Trading Spaces The Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre held its Unconventional Evening event in the foyer instead of its ballroom.
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handed over the keys to its facility to the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Para- lympic Games, and made plans to reclaim the building three months later. During those three months, ExCeL was completely closed down for business conferences and conventions, and used to house a good portion of the largest global event of all — seven Olympic and six Paralympic sports. In doing so, ExCeL became the most complex
venue in Olympic history. “Normally you would have one venue for the fencing, one venue for table tennis, one venue for weightlifting, etc. You do not traditionally get this multiuse,” said James Rees, ExCeL London’s director of conferences and events, who sat down with Convene in his office at ExCeL just a few weeks before the Summer Games got under way. “And the fact that we had those seven Olympic
sports, the practice halls, the warm-up zones, the staffing areas, the offices, the TV studio, the com- pounds for vehicles underneath the venue — it was the complexity of all the different uses that the one facility [had], which has not been the case ever.” Accommodating displaced meetings busi-
ness over those three months wasn’t too much of a headache. ExCeL had seven years to plan its “diary,” and worked closely with its existing clients. “Fortunately, we managed to find a home
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for each bit of business that would normally run in those periods,” Rees said, “either before or after the Games.” It was a small price to pay for the exposure
ExCeL gained during the Games, which will take the center “to the next level from a branding point of view,” Rees said. “The positive feedback that we’ve had from Facebook and Twitter and in the media about the experience of visiting ExCeL — we couldn’t have asked for anything better, and I think it has really given us greater credence both nationally and internationally.” That brand recognition was magnified by the
fact that ExCeL’s name remained intact during the Olympics, which wasn’t the case with most of the other facilities used for the Games. For example, the O2 arena — for which the U.K.-based O2 mobile network had bought naming rights in 2005 — had its name switched by the International Olympic Committee to “the North Greenwich Arena” for the duration of the Games, so as not to conflict with official Olympic sponsorships, which included telecom providers. The only naming condition that the committee
imposed on ExCeL was for the center — which is owned by the Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company (ADNEC) — to lose its Abu Dhabi sub- branding. “We had to lose the Abu Dhabi branding