The Big Pitch 2025
Haskell’s Big Pitch is a Shark Tank–style event where employees pitch workplace ideas to leadership, and one winning concept earns a cash prize and support to move forward. For the 2025 edition, Castano Group helped shape the full experience—creating generative event visuals, designing and producing the live show environment on custom LED screens, and creating content that carried the story from pre-event hype into the room. We also expanded the format with a Popular Vote, a multi-camera livestream for remote viewers, and AI-powered activations that made the event feel modern, fun, and unmistakably Big Pitch.
We produced the live awards show from the ground up—content, cueing, and on-stage visuals built to hit cleanly in the room and on camera. This year, the look moved from projection mapping to custom LED screens, giving the event a brighter, sharper canvas for motion graphics, speaker moments, and big reveals.
For those who couldn’t be in the room, we built a live broadcast workflow that brought Big Pitch to remote teams. Studio cameras fed into a streaming platform with real-time audio and live switching—so the online experience felt like a true program, not a single-camera recording.
For the first time, the audience had a real stake in the outcome. Each table was able to cast a vote after each pitch, locking it in by pressing the green-button. It turned the room from spectators into participants—and created a second win moment that landed like an event highlight, not an add-on.
To build hype—and to keep the theme of Growth front and center—we introduced Lil’ Hamz, a playful AI “baby” version of host Hamzah Shanbari. The concept landed a simple message with a wink: big ideas start small.
We brought the Lil’ Hamz concept into the crowd with an AI photobooth that transformed attendees into “baby versions” of themselves. It was fast, funny, and shareable—an activation that got people lining up, talking, and taking a piece of the event home.
