A Partnership Built for Moments Like This
Ernst De Planque had heard Irina from Seismic’s Strategic Enablement Services team describe the offering at Seismic’s City Tours event the year prior. The idea of a specialized team that could act as a genuine extension of a customer’s enablement function, scaling up when needed without displacing the team’s own identity or work, stood out immediately. When planning began for the summit, Expedia Group moved quickly to bring Seismic in as a strategic and operational partner.
From the outset, Seismic’s Strategic Enablement Services team helped shape the event’s purpose, structure, and flow. They partnered closely with Meghan Keough and her leadership team to define the agenda, establish a clear content framework, and align contributors on expectations. As planning advanced, the Seismic team absorbed the production heavy lifting and maintained a disciplined operating rhythm that kept stakeholders aligned from concept through execution.
They also brought in MONOKI, a Hamburg-based branding agency founded in 2004 and specializing in Brand Building, Brand Design, and Brand Experience, as a key creative partner on the engagement. The collaboration with MONOKI would prove to be one of the defining elements of the RISE Summit’s success.
MONOKI: Turning a Theme into an Identity
At the heart of the RISE Summit’s impact was the creative work MONOKI brought to life. Working alongside Seismic’s Strategic Enablement Services team, MONOKI developed the event’s entire brand identity from the ground up. They conceived the RISE theme and translated it into a complete event identity: a custom brand system, event collateral, and a professionally produced opening video complete with an original custom song.
For a globally distributed team coming together at an important inflection point, the experience of walking into a space that had been built entirely for them was powerful. As Meghan recalled, “The team loved the hype video. People were just beaming — you could feel the positive energy in the room and see the smiles on their faces.”
MONOKI’s work did more than set a tone. It signaled to every attendee that this was a meaningful investment in the team and in the future they were building together. The quality and intentionality of the brand experience became central to the event’s ability to create energy, focus, and shared ownership.
Designing an Experience, Not Just an Agenda
The Seismic team coordinated with external vendors, including the event’s AV partner, to ensure seamless execution across all three days. Photo and video capture opportunities were identified throughout, creating content that could later be repurposed for training and internal communications and extending the summit’s value well beyond the days in London.
The summit was structured with genuine intention. Day one was reserved for a leadership pre-session: a dedicated space for managers to align on priorities, messaging, and how they wanted to lead the experience for the broader team. The subsequent days brought together individual contributors and managers in a format that was deliberately interactive, with whiteboards, flip charts, post-it exercises, and hands-on activities woven into each session.
A team-building activity facilitated by the Seismic team pushed participants to think creatively, work under pressure, and connect with colleagues across regions — and quickly became one of the highlights of the event. A listening session was also built into the agenda, during which leaders stepped out of the room so team members could share candid feedback in a facilitated, anonymous format. That feedback was then used to build action plans the team owned themselves. As Meghan put it, “People own what they create.”
The summit closed with an industry expert panel featuring voices from a brewery, a former Legoland Paris executive, and an analytics leader, moderated by Madfest. Rather than keeping the conversation narrowly focused on lodging, the panel opened participants up to how broader advertising industry trends were reshaping the business landscape, a perspective that resonated deeply and ranked among the highest-rated moments of the entire event.
On-site, the Seismic team operated as a seamless extension of the Expedia team: taking notes, troubleshooting technical issues, providing an impartial point of view during the leadership pre-session, and ensuring that every session ran smoothly from start to finish. As Ernst described it, “It felt very much like we just had a bunch of additional hands, but hands that are very capable.”
