Go West Creative invests $1 million to create two new studios

See Correction/Clarification at end of article

Everyone had to learn new ways to communicate at the outset of Covid-19 pandemic.

But executives in the C-suite may have needed a little more help than others.

“During the Covid, the big challenge for a lot of these guys was that suddenly they are at home. They are used to going to a conference and having a stage manager walk up to them and say, ‘Come this way. Let me put this mic on you. When the music plays you’re going to walk out and step on this mark right here. Your teleprompter is right down there,' ” Go West Creative founder and CEO David Fischette said. “Now, they are at home like, ‘Wait, how do I do Zoom?’”

That’s where Nashville-based creative agency Go West Creative came in — pivoting its business from coaching executives on messaging for live events, such as investor conferences or employee engagement, to putting on virtual events for those same big name brands. 

The change was so successful, Fischette said, the firm invested $1 million to build two new hi-tech studios to broadcast virtual events inside Go West’s Rundle Avenue headquarters, which officially opened last month.

Nearly all in-person business gatherings were forced to cancel or move online as the pandemic took hold over the U.S. While in-person events are beginning to return, 92% of organizations that held a virtual conference during the pandemic say they will hold a virtual event again in the future, according to The Virtual Conferences Report. 

One reason for that, said Go West Chief Operating Officer Eileen Valois, is business leaders learned they could reach their entire employee base more easily virtually, than by traveling to satellite offices or by bringing employees from around the globe to one location.

But along with convenience comes concern over keeping those employees engaged, while in front of their computer screens.

“The majority of our business is helping these corporate clients still deliver their message in a meaningful way,” Fischette said. “The challenge people were facing when Covid first hit, and some to this day are still facing it, is they think they can just take what they were doing on the stage in the ballroom of the Music City Center, put a camera on that, push it out and call it a virtual meeting. It’s not. … What we’ve had a lot of success with … is bring in the elements of broadcast television and bring that into a corporate broadcast in a way that makes it feel authentic and not over the top cheesy or disingenuous.”

Essentially, instead of having a CEO come out and do a 45-minute monologue, Fischette said his firm, may break it up with a commercial that gets part of the CEO’s message out and then come back from break with the CEO sitting for a Q&A session. 

That creativity, along with expectations that the desire for virtual events will continue to grow after the pandemic, is what pushed Go West to build their two new studios.

Studio A and Studio B can film commercials, music videos and broadcast virtual events worldwide. The studios also have software that can create virtual environments, as well as in-person event space, Valois said.

“One thing that has stayed with me though out [the pandemic] is how do we come through this crisis … and come out better on the other side?” Valois said. “I think some of that is what we are seeing here. This studio has come out of that. It’s come out of being stronger on the other side and what it’s enabled us to do is help or clients reach even more people than they would with a live event.”