INNOVATOR PROFILES: SPECIAL RECOGNITION
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Dave Crump with the Creative Technology team at ISE 2023
have done every European event ever since. That marked the beginning of our incredible relationship with the European PGA (now DP World Tour). We started with Wimbledon in the late nineties and by then had toured the world with the likes of Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Elton John and the Eurythmics. That legacy continues to this day. Across NEP Live Events we deliver most, if not all, of the major festivals: Coachella, Glastonbury, Roskilde and North Sea Jazz to name a few of the most iconic. Our sports portfolio (outside of the Olympics) includes most of the tennis Grand Slams, World Athletics, Nascar, Uefa, PGA and LIV Golf – again to name but a few. We have built these relationships by continuing to innovate and working with clients to develop the audience experience. This journey will continue to accelerate, as being creative with technology becomes increasingly fundamental to the way events are delivered and consumed. You have been involved in leading businesses, managing teams, building relationships and overseeing projects. Which part will you miss the most? I’ll miss every element. The thrill of the chase, the buzz and excitement of doing a live show, irrespective of the size/scale. I’ll miss the technology and interaction with world-class designers and engineers. Above all, I’ll miss the people, our staff, our clients and everyone we interact with to do what we do. That said, many of these people are my friends and I’ll be staying in touch with them and the industry. It’s been my life for 45 years and I’ll still be around in some capacities for a while to come.
wanting our services in increasingly far-flung locations. In 2017, Creative Technology became part of NEP. What effect did this have on your career and the company? Richard Murray (our incredibly supportive original investor) had been saying for some time he would like to exit when the right opportunity came up. A number of our best friends (albeit also competitors) had joined the NEP Group and we could see numerous synergies and opportunities. I met the then CEO in Brazil during the 2016 Olympics and one thing led to another, resulting in CT being acquired by the NEP Group in early 2017. This marked another massive evolution for the company; we again consolidated some business units but, more importantly, our growth was kickstarted again alongside a strategy to re-brand some of the other group businesses CT. Despite the very significant hiccup of Covid-19 in the early 2020s (a time when NEP were incredibly supportive), the period since joining NEP has arguably seen CT transform into the truly global business we are today. In your current role, you are leading the strategy on the business of sport, regional and global competitions, festivals, concert touring and entertainment. What can you tell us about your experience and trends? How long have you got? Many of our relationships go back to the eighties and nineties. Corporate production clients such as Imagination, Jack Morton and many others have evolved, merged, restructured and – of course – grown, but many of the same people are there. We did our first Ryder Cup in 1985 and
distributor model and consolidated our businesses into specific regions where we could acquire and/or organically grow a business. By the second decade, we had a permanent CT presence in Holland, Spain, Dubai, Doha and China, with our ambitions set on more locations as and when people and resources allowed. These same years also marked our genuine transformation into a global specialist in the multi-sport world, and indeed the building or our amazing sporting portfolio. We were already working closely with Wimbledon and the European PGA, however in 2002 we then added the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, marking our first foray into Games-wide AV delivery as an official provider. Shortly after this, London was seriously bidding for and ultimately won the right to host the 2012 Olympic Games. I was determined we would use the opportunity to build a position as a leader in this incredible, growing space, something that would be a catalyst for ongoing future investment and a reliable future revenue stream. I guess the stars aligned – we were in the right place at the right time, with a supportive investor. We won everything we went for in London and started an amazing relationship with Panasonic (as the Olympics AV sponsor) which survives to this day. Twenty years on, we are here in Paris, our seventh full-service Olympic Games, and have delivered another half-dozen global multi-sport events. This all happened alongside a similar and no-less-dramatic evolution across the other sectors of our business, with the corporate world becoming increasingly international and our clients
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