It used to be a lighting and kitchen showroom, but Verve Marketing’s new office on Erne Street Upper is now kitted out with a meeting space in the form of a Citroen DS.
The 40-year-old car – "like the one in The Day of the Jackal" – belongs to the event management agency's founder and managing director, Ronan Traynor. He put the car into storage after he became a parent because it doesn't have rear seatbelts, but after 12 years he has found a use for it, giving it a new coat of paint and reversing the front seats so they face the rear.
Employee engagement
“It started off as a bit of a gimmick, but clients love it,” he says. “It takes three to four people easily, without being cramped.”
Verve, which employs 35 people and specialises in events, creative installations and employee engagement programmes, has also just opened an office in London, where it hopes to ramp up its the volume of business it wins from multinationals and take its total headcount beyond 40.
The agency counts Google, Diageo, Microsoft, Dropbox and Twitter among its employee engagement clients here. "We're lucky to be able to work with them, because they have large workforces and they push you to be creative," says Traynor.
Verve’s recent work for Coca-Cola includes running “Share a Coke” pop-up galleries, where passers-by could pick out bottles with their names on them until all the bottles were gone. “The galleries lasted on average two to four hours,” he says.
Dancergy' sessions Verve, which calls itself "the live agency", is also a happy Electric Picnic regular, where its experience-based approach saw it installing a "sustainable dancefloor" for Electric Ireland with fitness guru Mr Motivator on hand to lead "d
ancergy” sessions designed to generate electricity.
At this year's festival, Verve will run a promotion called "Be the Band" for Unilever deodorant Sure. It's about "getting up and performing in front of your friends", says Traynor – and presumably realising you might need some help with perspiration control as you do so.
