Graffiti as the cultural programme of the annual conference

The annual conference of the Milchindustrie-Verband, the German dairy industry association, includes a cultural programme. For that a coach stood ready one afternoon at the Wellenwerk Berlin, and the conference party picked up the spray cans themselves. The association brought the motto with it: Milk Buzz.

The task

A cultural programme holds a thankless position at an annual conference. It sits between technical sessions, it is supposed to get the guests talking to each other, and it meets people who have been listening since the morning.

With an association something is added that a company team event does not have: the people in the room are not colleagues but come from different member companies. A programme item that rewards a well-rehearsed team or assumes prior knowledge reliably goes wrong under those conditions.

The execution

The afternoon revolved around a single shared object: a coach that everyone sprays together. That solves exactly the problem from the previous paragraph. A bus is long enough for many hands to work at the same time without having to coordinate, and it has no bad spots. So there is nothing to allocate and nobody to assign, which helps with a party that barely knows one another.

The motif did not have to be found first, because the motto came from the association itself: Milk Buzz. That answered the toughest question of any creative format before it was asked. The guests sprayed themselves, guided by Luca.

The result

At the end the bus carries a picture along its full length: in the middle MILK in large silver bubble letters, to the right BUZZ, in front and behind colour fields in red, pink, orange and violet. That is the part you can photograph.

The other part is in the Google review the association wrote afterwards, and for planning a cultural programme it is the more important one. We quote it here in full, translated from the German original, because it describes the afternoon more precisely than we could from our own perspective.

Frequently asked questions about this project

Does a graffiti workshop fit into an association's annual conference as a cultural programme?

Yes, and the Milchindustrie-Verband did exactly that: the graffiti workshop at the Wellenwerk Berlin was the cultural programme of its annual conference, on one afternoon, with the association's motto Milk Buzz as the motif on a bus.

The difference to a company team event lies not in the procedure but in the agenda around it. A cultural programme has a fixed slot between two technical sessions and has to work exactly there: without a long introduction, without anyone having to read something beforehand, and with an end that can be announced. An object everyone works on at the same time meets that more easily than a programme with rounds and interim results. Anyone planning an annual conference therefore looks first for the line in the offer that says how many people can lend a hand in parallel, not the line with the duration.

Does that also work with guests who only see each other once a year?

Yes. At an annual conference people from different member companies stand side by side, not a well-rehearsed team. At the Milchindustrie-Verband the guests picked up the spray cans themselves, guided by Luca; the format assumes no prior knowledge.

That is the reason a shared object holds up better here than a group competition. Competitions reward teams that know each other and turn a conference party into winners and losers within ten minutes. At a bus there is no such sorting: there are only areas, and who stands next to whom sorts itself out. For the planning that means the composition of the guests does not have to be known beforehand. You only appreciate that when the attendance list is still growing two days before the conference.