How Cardboard Spaceship Produced a Hybrid Investor Day Broadcast for Academy Sports + Outdoors
The Client
When a public company hosts an Investor Day, the audience in the room is only part of the story. The analysts and institutional investors watching remotely often outnumber the in-person crowd and their experience of the event shapes how the company’s strategy, guidance, and leadership come across.
Academy Sports + Outdoors engaged Cardboard Spaceship to produce the broadcast side of its Investor Day: a live, professionally captured event at the company’s corporate headquarters, delivered simultaneously to a virtual audience of analysts, investors, and stakeholders.
Our Approach
The assignment was focused and operational. Academy didn’t need a campaign built from scratch. It needed the live event captured cleanly, broadcast reliably, and experienced professionally by everyone watching remotely.
That meant three things had to be true on event day:
The virtual audience needed a clear, dynamic view of every presentation, not a single static camera pointed at a podium. The broadcast needed branded graphics, speaker transitions, and segment structure so the remote experience felt produced, not surveilled. And the entire webcast infrastructure from registration, access, reminders, and replay had to work without friction for an audience whose time and attention are expensive.
An integrated content strategy for a key investor event
Cardboard Spaceship served as the full-service production partner, leading every dimension of the engagement:
We deployed a three-camera setup to give virtual attendees distinct viewpoints throughout the presentations — wide establishing angles and tighter speaker framing that kept the remote experience visually engaging across a multi-hour program. Stage design and lighting were kept minimal and purposeful, supporting the presenters without competing with them. This is the same full-service video production discipline we bring to commercial and corporate work, applied to a live financial communications setting.
The virtual experience opened with a branded countdown for remote attendees and moved through speaker and segment slides, lower-third-style overlays for each executive, transitional sequences between speakers, and a closing thank-you slide. Academy provided its final presentation materials; our team handled the graphic package and visual execution that stitched the program together on screen.
Small details, but they do real work. Transitions and overlays tell a remote viewer where they are in the program, who is speaking, and why it matters — the connective tissue that separates a produced broadcast from a raw camera feed.
Beyond the cameras, Cardboard Spaceship managed the full virtual attendee lifecycle: a registration page and capture form, automated email notifications, calendar invitations and reminders, live webcast hosting, and automated replay distribution to registrants after the event.
Post-event, Academy received in-depth analytics — registrant data, engagement summaries, attendance and engagement by minute, and follow-up reporting. For an IR team, that data is more than a courtesy; it shows who showed up, what held their attention, and where follow-up conversations should start. This registration-and-access layer draws on the same infrastructure we build for event microsites supporting Investor Days and other high-stakes shareholder communications.
The Result
Academy Sports + Outdoors delivered its financial performance and forward guidance to both the room and the remote audience through a high-end, seamless broadcast with clarity for the presenters, a professional experience for virtual attendees, and complete registration-through-replay reporting for the IR team afterward.
Planning an Investor Day?
If your team is preparing an Investor Day, analyst day, or another moment where the market is watching closely, we’d be glad to talk through what a disciplined broadcast and virtual experience looks like for your event. You can also explore our related Investor Day work for Zeta Global Holdings, Masco, and Terex Corp.
