Identity has won three awards at the Event Tech Awards, including The Most Creative Agency in Event Tech. The agency also took Best Use of Technology at a Sporting Event and Best Use of Technology for Engagement & Interaction (B2C).
Every winning entry started with a client challenge, with the technology chosen to solve it. How do you hold one show together across eight stadiums and welcome thousands of first-time fans? How do you turn a brand’s precision into something the public can feel? And how do you make a fireworks display land with 11 million people watching at home?
Eight stadiums, one show
Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 set out to be the biggest tournament in the sport’s history. It had to feel consistent in every venue while making new fans feel at home from the opening whistle. Identity Sport and Dreamlike Studio, part of Identity, built a centralised show-control and content system that ran across all eight stadiums. Operators adjusted pacing and content in real time to suit each crowd, drawing on a library of more than 700 bespoke video assets. A narrated rules guide explained referee calls to newcomers, and fan profiling shaped in-bowl content for an audience that was 52% female.
The tournament sold 444,465 tickets and drew 81,885 people to the final, a world record for a women’s game. Live data feeds connected the stadium to broadcast and social channels, contributing to 56.13 million broadcast views and 905 million social impressions, achieving the objective of expanding the reach of the women’s game.
Precision people could feel
For a luxury watchmaker at the Winter Olympics in Milan, the brief was to turn the brand’s expertise in precision into something visitors could experience for themselves, whether they were families, casual visitors or collectors. Identity designed the pavilion to be felt first and explained second.
A VR bobsleigh ride used in-seat haptics, fans and spatial audio after R&D showed that a full motion platform would compromise guest safety. An accessible sled gave guests with limited mobility, and neurodivergent guests, the same ride. An AR figure-skating rink animated a CGI athlete on real data from the brand’s own judging technology, and an AI photo moment produced 27,084 shareable images. Across 420 open hours, 48,277 people visited and the bobsleigh held 98% uptime.
Creativity as the mechanism
The Most Creative Agency award recognised work across Identity’s portfolio. For the Mayor of London’s New Year’s Eve fireworks, delivered for the Greater London Authority for the fourth year running, Identity and Pixel Artworks used Hologauze projection at a scale not attempted before, so the display worked for 11 million viewers at home as well as 100,000 people on the ground.
At Cannes Lions, every banner and sign in Adobe’s presence was made with Adobe Firefly, and guests designed their own totes with it in real time. For one of the Big Four professional services firms, Identity created a wholly AI-generated tax director, set three years in the future, to carry a keynote argument about AI adoption. Much of the room did not realise he was synthetic until the reveal.
What the team says
Matt Margetson, Innovation Director at Identity, said: “Clients don’t come to us asking for haptics or holograms. They come with a problem, and technology on its own won’t solve it. That takes an insight, a clear strategy, and big ideas, and those come from a team with a diverse range of skills and crafts. Once we have the big ideas, we use fresh thinking and technology to supercharge the experience. Often that means putting tech and tech stacks together in combinations nobody has dreamt of, and challenging how they’ve been used before.
On the bobsleigh activation, our insight was that across a very broad audience, the one thing everyone shared was wanting to feel immersed. A transportive, liminal experience was what connected them to the brand on a deeper level. So we paired a custom-built bobsleigh with a custom bobsleigh track generated in VR on real-world telemetry, then added haptics, wind, and snow to put people on it. In total, 48,277 visitors came through the pavilion. Get it right and people remember it, talk about it, and share it. That’s what won all three awards last night: a team with a diverse array of skills, working closely together and challenging what’s possible.”
Emma Gardner, Executive Design Director at Identity, said: “Technology gets people’s attention. Creativity is what makes them feel something once you’ve got it. Every one of these projects started with a feeling: your heart thumping in the tunnel before a bobsleigh start, or a first-time rugby fan finally getting the ref’s call. Then we chose the tools to get there. When creativity and technology are developed together from day one, the guest never notices the join, and that’s where the results come from.”
How do you make event technology deliver on strategy?
Event technology works when it starts with the client’s problem, and the tools are chosen to solve it. Identity, the experience agency, won three Event Tech Awards, including The Most Creative Agency in Event Tech, for work built this way. That work included one show-control system running across all eight stadiums of Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025, and a VR bobsleigh ride that turned a luxury watchmaker’s precision into something guests could feel.
The proof shows in attendance and reach. The show Identity delivered for Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 held 92% average attendance across eight stadiums, and the final drew a world-record 81,885 people for a women’s game. The luxury watchmaker’s pavilion welcomed 48,277 visitors, and its bobsleigh ride held 98% uptime across 420 hours. Identity develops creativity and technology together from the first idea, which is why guests experience the result without noticing the technology behind it.
