Get 1,300 leaders telling the same story.

I was Head of Strategy and Communications at Motion, leading a team of 5. For 9 months I worked with Hilton’s VP of Communications and her team on every communications element of the conference: the narrative and all its content, the email programme, choosing the app, and the app’s structure, interface and content. The wider Motion team ran programming and operations, and the team members I directed built the app to my design.

Hilton wanted the best, most memorable and best-communicated event it had ever run for Asia Pacific, bringing 1,300 senior leaders from across the region’s markets behind a single 2025 vision. The conference had to inform them, align them and energise them, and then prove it had landed. The failure to avoid was easy to name: an event nobody remembered.

Every delegate had to receive the right information without a hitch, and that set how we worked: which language versions each message needed, what each group of delegates had to know, and at which stage, before the conference, during it and after it.

Hilton’s line, held tight, with one app at the centre.

“Our Team. Our Time.” was Hilton’s tagline for the event, so we carried it faithfully: we held to Hilton’s brand guidelines across every touchpoint, from the plenary graphics to the app in each delegate’s hand, and put our own creative flair into the assets made for this event alone.

The companion app became the centre of it, with live polling, personalised agendas and peer networking in one place, and a newsfeed, games and push notifications that gave delegates a reason to keep opening it.

The hard part was volume. Eight communications touchpoints across the app, email, surveys and the conference itself meant a great many assets on a great many timelines, and many stakeholders needed a say in each one. That only works with administrative rigour that never slips, across every workstream, for all 9 months.

App engagement was one of our key measures, so we tracked usage before the conference and during it, and it reached 98% across the 1,300 senior leaders.

Hilton’s Global CEO called it the best-organised global event that year, and it was delivered on time and on budget, from the first brief to the final survey.