Global Firm, Offsite in Vienna,
1600 delegates, 4 days, 50+ headshots per hour
PineRock needed a headshot activation that would run for four days without anyone on their team having to look at it.
Global Firm, Offsite in Vienna,
2 Booths,
four days
276 in one five-hour day
50+ per hour at the busiest
848 delivered
8 crew in Vienna
3,300+ edited event images
The brief
PineRock is a New York brand experience agency. They were producing a four-day offsite conference in Vienna for a global tech company, and headshots were one line on a very long run sheet.
Two drop-in booths, 10 am to 5 pm, all four days. No appointments and no scheduling. Attendees photographed whenever they happened to have a gap.
Agencies do not really buy photography. They buy the confidence that one item on the run sheet will not be the one that goes wrong, in a city they are not based in, in front of a client they cannot afford to disappoint.
Day 1: 276 headshots in just 5h!
Day one ran (as scheduled) from midday to 5 pm, two hours shorter than the rest (10 am-5 pm).
Those five hours produced 276 portraits, more than any other day of the conference.
That is more than 50 an hour across the two booths, over five straight hours, compared with the 40 an hour we contracted for.
Arrival day usually works like this. People come off a bus, collect a badge, and have an hour with nothing scheduled. It is the best window at any conference, and also the one most often missed because it sits before the programme officially starts. If you are planning an activation, that hour is worth more than any slot you could book later in the week.
There was a queue from the moment we opened, new people kept arriving, and the crew found their rhythm inside the first twenty minutes. What it does tell you is what two booths can absorb when a queue forms in front of them, which is the only circumstance in which throughput matters at all. On a quiet afternoon, the rate is irrelevant. On the day everybody turns up, it is the whole job.
Day 2: All-hands sessions, demand only in between sessions.
The programme was almost entirely all-hands. The booths were open for seven hours, but for long stretches, nobody came for a photograph. Everything that happened that day happened in heavy spikes between sessions and around lunch, totalling under two hours of real opportunity. We managed 78 headshots in that time, which equals around 39 per hour for both booths combined.
That is the point about conference demand. The booths were busy for a quarter of the day and idle for the rest. What you are buying is the capacity to absorb the spike, because the spike is the only time anyone is available. The team knew day 2 would be like this, so when demand peaked, we were at peak throughput.
Day 3 & 4: Normal conference demand
Days 3 and 4 were much like ‘typical’ conference days: demand peaked before, during, and after the sessions, with moderate but steady demand during the sessions, as not everyone attends events all day.
Over all four days, everyone who wanted a portrait got one. Nobody was turned away.
Where that meant staying open a few minutes past five, we stayed. Where people were already queueing before the published start, we opened early rather than making them stand and watch the clock. That is the part the second booth actually bought. Not a bigger number at the end of the week, but the ability to say yes to everybody who asked, on a schedule nobody could have predicted.
Neither booth closed for lunch on any of the four days. At a conference, that is not a detail. Lunch is one of the few windows when everybody is out of a session and free, so a booth that shuts at one o’clock misses the busiest hour of the day. As we had two headshot photographers, three assistants and the founder on site, we could rotate for lunch – all of us ate, but the booth stayed open continuously.
Headshot Summary
We received amazing feedback from the conference delegates, who proudly showed their new headshots on their phones to colleagues as they left. Pinerock and the client were also extremely pleased with our service. Looking at the numbers, the feedback and the images we created, we are very proud of this project.
| Day | Doors | Portraits | Average Per hour | What was happening |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | 12 to 5 | 276 | 50+ | Doors open from midday; busiest day |
| Day 2 | 10 to 5 | 78 | 11 | All-hands sessions; demand in between |
| Day 3 | 10 to 5 | 253 | 36 | ‘Normal’ conference demand |
| Day 4 | 10 to 5 | 241 | 34 | ‘Normal’ conference demand |
| Total | 848 |
Each person chose up to five shots on screen, entered their name and email address, and the images arrived within seconds.
848 people left Vienna with a portrait they could use that week. PineRock left with nothing to chase, no gallery to distribute, and no follow-up email that half the audience would ignore.
It also showed our throughput to the hour. Because every portrait leaves as an email the moment it is chosen, the delivery log is a live count. We were reading it hour by hour throughout the conference.
The other half of the job: Event Photography
20,000+ Frames shot
3300+ Edited images delivered
100+ delivered daily within 24h
72h to the full set
Alongside the booths, we came with two additional event photographers to cover the conference itself, from the eight o’clock breakfast sessions through the end-of-evening events, across all four days and three venues.
The daily delivery matters more than the total. A conference has a social media window, and it closes the moment people fly home. More than a hundred finished images every day, within 24 hours, meant PineRock and the client posted from day one rather than assembling a recap the following week.
The complete set of more than 3,300 edited images landed within 72 hours of the last session.
Three venues in four days
The conference took place at the Austria Center Vienna. The welcome reception was at the Hofburg on Monday evening; Tuesday was ‘Dine Out’ in Vienna (no photo coverage); Thursday was the Grande Event at Schloss Schönbrunn; and the closing party was back at the ACV.
One supplier, two disciplines
The booths and the event coverage ran as one crew, on one brief, with one point of contact and one invoice. For an agency that is not small. It is two fewer suppliers to brief, chase, badge and reconcile.
One more thing….
Pinerock asked us if we could capture ‘a bit of video’ on the side. There wasn’t a budget for a separate videographer, so we captured this ‘on the side’ with a little handheld gimbal camera. For them, for us, to remember an absolutely fantastic week with amazing people at incredible venues.
I cannot say enough good things about Moritz and his team. From the moment I met the Headshot Bureau over Zoom, I could tell they were true professionals who wanted to work as partners to put on an amazing event together. My instincts were right – our onsite collaboration and teamwork was fun, collaborate and felt “easy.” Not a small feat for a 3 venue, 1600-person, 4-day event.
Thank you, Moritz and team, for making PineRock and the main client feel so taken care of. Oh, and the photos/videos taken – best in class, truly!
We can’t wait to work with you again!
Julie Hyde
Executive Producer, PineRock
Running something similar?
Tell us the venue, the dates and the attendee count, and we will tell you how many booths it takes and what it costs. We work across London, Europe and further for multi-day events.
We ran that conference headshot station the same way we run an event headshot booth at exhibitions and trade shows.