Icon, Europe's leading event branding specialist, has been appointed to provide and manage all the branding at a series of unusual venues around the UK as part of the series of Vodafone TBA gigs featuring leading contemporary musical artists.

Icon are reporting into Octagon who organise the events and has the responsibility for coming up with branding solutions for the selected venues for this innovative music programme which has been developed by Vodafone in conjunction with Channel 4. Each event is held at a “secret” gig with an invited audience chosen from the public who register by text to a special Vodafone number. Each gig is filmed by Channel 4 for a series called TBA which is then available on the Vodafone Live website and is shown on Channel 4 a couple of weeks later.

The short timescales involved and the unique nature of the selected venues makes this a particularly testing series of projects. Commenting on the appointment, Icon's Sales and Marketing Director, Andrew Hodson said, “The Vodafone TBA gigs are a completely new challenge for us in terms of the secrecy, short timescales involved and the unusual venues that are used. It requires much greater flexibility but also enables our design teams to be more creative and expansive than when faced with a more straightforward project. Because of the secret location of each venue, the exterior branding and signage all has to be done in the last few hours before the gig starts and not revealed until the very last minute”.

This season's TBA gigs run throughout the summer and in the past have featured bands such as Snow Patrol, The Zutons, Pussycat Dolls and Amy Winehouse who last month opened this season's programme playing to 200 lucky winners in a church in Bristol.