Taking the Next Bite: Driving sign-ups for Brussels food innovation event

EIT Food

For Next Bite 2025, we built and ran the cross-channel campaign that brought Europe's food innovation community together, coordinating six audiences, five event tracks, and over 15,000 personalised emails into one unified call to show up.
The result: 1,200+ registrations, 27,000+ website visits, and a single coherent narrative across every touchpoint.

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Challenge

Next Bite is EIT Food’s annual flagship event, gathering individuals and organisations from across the food supply chain for 2 days of workshops, panel talks, demonstrations, sampling and networking. It's the moment when the entire EIT Food community, and the wider food innovation ecosystem, comes together in person.

EIT Food boasts a large community of stakeholders, and this campaign was built around informing and engaging existing, as well as new, EIT Food audiences and ensuring they received the correct information ahead of the event.

This scale provides big opportunities, but also comes with a unique set of challenges. EIT Food's community is large, layered, and diffuse, with existing partners, members, alumni, and an ever-expanding pool of new audiences. Each group sits at a different distance from the event, with different reasons to attend, different access to tickets and pre-event happenings, and different channels through which they engage.

The campaign needed to do two things at once: bring the existing community back with the right information at the right time, and pull new audiences into an event most of them had never heard of, without diluting the message for either group.

Insight

Gathering the whole European food innovation community, the event planning spanned various internal teams and external stakeholders, resulting in multiple, sometimes competing, priorities and campaign ideas. The event's mission: to build the future of food together; requiring a robust messaging strategy and execution framework to showcase its scale and impact.

There was also a brand dimension. Next Bite was being positioned as a standalone event with its own identity, distinct from EIT Food's year-round communications. Existing members needed to recognise it as theirs. New audiences needed to encounter it as something worth showing up for in its own right.

What the campaign needed first was a backbone — a messaging framework that could hold the event's identity together and flex across audiences without losing coherence. Once that was in place, everything downstream became execution rather than negotiation.

At this scale, "personalised" usually collapses into either generic mass emails with a first name swapped in, or a logistically impossible promise. The opportunity was to build personalisation into the system itself with automation journeys that could handle the segmentation seamlessly, so every recipient felt like the email was written for them.

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Answer

We started with onboarding into the new Next Bite brand. Working alongside the EIT Food team, we helped finalise and refine the Next Bite identity, expanding the visual guidelines, building a flexible template system, and shifting the look away from stock imagery toward real people from the community. The result was a campaign that stood out from the corporate visual noise of LinkedIn, and a brand that people recognised before they even read the caption.

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From there, we built the messaging architecture: one overarching framework for the event, layered audience-specific tracks, and stage-level narratives for each part of the programme. Every piece of content stemmed from this foundation.

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Once the messaging framework was confirmed, we created a communications toolkit with ready-made social media posts, visual assets, email signatures and Teams backgrounds so employees, attendees, and speakers could become part of the campaign. We also audited and refined the web descriptions of all event sessions, ensuring they followed a consistent format and aligned with the key messaging.

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On social, we ran the main EIT Food channel and the FoodHIVE community platform in parallel, each with its own rhythm and customised posts. Each post addressed a different aspect of the event, providing a comprehensive view of what to expect.

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An automation engine handled email personalisation at scale: every recipient got a message sent from their actual EIT Food contact, with the right code, the right next step, and the right reason to be there. This resulted in 63 email journeys and a total of 15,185 emails sent.

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Throughout the campaign, up until 2 weeks post-event, we ran manual social listening on LinkedIn, tracking mentions and topics, joining conversations and using insights to inform the event campaign.

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The campaign was concluded with a full campaign report, delivered after the event once all communication activities were concluded.

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SCOPE

Campaign strategy and planning
Creative direction with Next Bite brand finalisation, visual identity refinement, and template system
Key messaging framework across audiences and programme tracks
Email automation strategy, copywriting, design, and optimisation
Social media design, copywriting, and scheduling
Manual social listening across the duration of the campaign
FoodHIVE community content and management
Web content audit and optimisation
Video briefing and editing for social assets
Communication toolkit and templates for partners, speakers, and staff
Post-campaign reporting and recommendationsnication toolkit

PERSONALISED EMAILS AT SCALE

The audience map had too many segments for a generic blast and too much volume for one-by-one writing, so we created a unique personalisation process for all email communication.

We designed an automation engine of 63 email journeys, each one branching by audience type, registration status, and assigned EIT Food contact. Over 15,000 emails were sent throughout the campaign, from the right person, with the right code, with the right call to action. At a scale where personalisation usually breaks, the system held.

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ATTENDEE BRAND

To strengthen organic brand awareness, we built a toolkit that turned the EIT Food community into a part of the campaign. With ready-to-use LinkedIn posts, customisable Canva templates, email signatures and Teams backgrounds, Speakers, startups, and partners were able to seamlessly join and contribute to building the event’s brand presence. Across channels, this created a recognisable Next Bite identity independent of the main EIT Food channels.

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KEEPING AN EAR TO THE GROUND

We ran manual social listening across the full duration of the campaign — tracking mentions, hashtags, and conversations on LinkedIn, and showing up in them when it made sense. This consistent presence let EIT Food understand which sessions the community was most excited about, sharpen the narrative in real time, and engage their audience as participants rather than recipients. By the time the event arrived, the conversation around it was already alive.

Impact

The campaign created a unified presence across social, web, email, and community, pulling existing members back in and bringing new audiences into an event many had never heard of.

The goal was 1,000 registrations. The campaign delivered over 1,200, an attendance rate well above industry norms for events of this scale. More importantly, EIT Food walked away with a brand, a messaging framework, and a campaign system they can run again the next time Next Bite comes around.