Merrill Lynch AES Experience

The Setup

Each year Merrill Lynch hosts five to six Advanced Education Symposium (AES) conferences across the country. Each one is a four-day learning and networking event for Financial Advisors, where they hear about industry trends, get hands-on with Merrill Lynch tools, and swap best practices with their peers. The events were valuable, but most of that value stayed in the room. Advisors who couldn’t attend missed it entirely, and attendees who skipped a session had no way to catch up. Merrill asked us to enhance the event experience digitally and extend key parts of it to non-attendees, so AES could keep working long after the last session ended.

What I Led

I was the creative director and lead designer on this project. I led the design of a digital layer for the symposium. It carries the event’s content to people who weren’t in the room, and it makes the experience richer for the people who were. That covered the experience strategy and information architecture through to the visual design of the web hub and the interactive wall. Throughout, the goal was to make both feel like one connected system rather than two separate projects.

What We Delivered

We proposed a content delivery ecosystem in two parts.

The web hub. A web-based hub that houses both live and on-demand content from the event. Advisors can stream the Main Stage live, ask questions and answer polls in real time, and download follow-along materials without leaving the page. Every keynote and breakout is archived, so attendees who missed a session and advisors who couldn’t travel get the same content. The hub also brings together the parts of the event that usually live on paper: the schedule, a personal agenda, the breakout tracks, the investment manager directory, and an attendee directory for making and keeping connections. Points for attending sessions, answering surveys and connecting with peers feed a leaderboard, which gives advisors a reason to keep coming back throughout the week.

The interactive wall. An interactive wall at the event itself, which gave attendees an immersive experience on site. The wall’s timeline of Merrill Lynch history, success stories and research highlights is tied directly to the hub. Something that catches an advisor’s eye in the foyer is waiting for them later on their phone or laptop.

Together, the two pieces turned a four-day event into an ongoing resource. Attendees got more out of every session, and the advisors who weren’t there still got the content.