Event Concept — PGW On The Move

The situation

Paris Games Week is one of the biggest gaming events in Europe but it stays inside a convention hall. The audience it reaches is already the converted: people who bought a ticket and planned to go. As a school project, our team of five built a fictional event agency called Virtua Event and pitched a concept to extend PGW beyond its walls.

The core insight driving the concept: the most valuable audience isn't the one that already comes — it's the tourists, families, and passersby in Paris who would never buy a ticket but can't ignore a gaming bus parked in front of the Eiffel Tower. Paris itself becomes the venue.

What needed to be done

• Reach a new audience tourists, families, casual passersby who would never attend PGW on their own
• Use Paris's iconic locations as free, shareable visual backdrops to generate organic content
• Create a funnel from outdoor street activations into the PGW venue itself
• Design an in-venue experience that maximises dwell time and commercial flow across both buildings
• Deliver a measurable, KPI-driven concept with a realistic budget breakdown

My approach

The concept was built on three interlocking layers: Reach (the outdoor activations), Content (Paris as a built-in backdrop), and Funnel (outdoor as the hook, in-venue as the reward). Each layer feeds the next.

The communication strategy was anchored around a single clear concept: "Paris becomes a real-life video game." This unlocked a consistent creative direction — glitch-style visuals, an NFC wristband Side Quest passport, TikTok and Instagram challenges using a dedicated hashtag, and influencer-led formats like "24 hours in Paris as a video game." Every activation was designed to be inherently shareable by existing in front of Paris's most recognisable landmarks.

As Head of Marketing for Virtua Event, I was responsible for the audience strategy, the communication plan, and the overall brand positioning of the agency in the pitch.

What we built

• Gaming Bus a branded mobile unit touring key Paris locations over 5 days. 480 players per day across 24 sessions of 20 minutes, with live stream link to the PGW arena and NFC passport scan at each stop
• Gaming Barge an evening immersive format on the Seine, ~300 participants per evening, with a post-session survey QR and premium positioning
• Side Quest App an NFC wristband passport connecting all outdoor and indoor activations. The app tracked outdoor-to-venue conversion, mission completion by zone, and served as the measurement layer for every other concept
• Immersive Worlds scenography, projection mapping, and guided group experiences inside the venue (€600K envelope)
• Creator Clash Arena a 500-seat stage with daily programming tiers, community vs. creator formats, and live streaming (€400K)
• Pixel Market indie game demos, artist alley, cosplay competition and limited edition drops placed on the natural visitor walking path (€250K)
• Defined the full visitor journey for all six touchpoints, from street discovery to venue exit
• Built the communication and partner strategy, including Twitch/YouTube media coverage and brand sponsor integration

Projected scale of the concept

All figures are projections built into the pitch to demonstrate the concept's potential reach and commercial viability:

Pitch deck & activation visuals

Slides, spatial layouts, visitor journey maps, and KPI frameworks from the full Virtua Event pitch presentation.

What I took away

The most valuable part of this project was learning to think in systems. Each activation only makes sense in relation to the others — the bus drives people to the venue, the Side Quest app measures the conversion, the venue experience justifies the journey. Designing that chain end-to-end is a different skill from designing individual moments.

Working as Head of Marketing in a five-person agency simulation also taught me how much communication strategy depends on the constraints of the other teams. Budget, logistics, timing — understanding those inputs made my messaging decisions sharper. You can't propose a viral TikTok campaign if the production team can't deliver the content it needs.