Prime location: how to put your brand up in the spotlight

Forty-eight hours, 12,000 visitors, an iconic location and one gold bottle worth £400,000. That’s what an immersive brand experience looked like for Prime, the energy drink created by YouTube stars KSI and Logan Paul, when it took over what is now the Below The Lights space in London’s Piccadilly Circus.

Below The Lights, which launches formally in July, is a three-storey, 6,650 sq feet space below, as the name suggests, the unmissable Piccadilly Lights on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue. The Piccadilly Lights have been owned by Landsec, one of the UK’s largest property developers, for more than 50 years. In recent decades it has acquired other relevant leaseholds to “realise our ambition to redevelop and revamp Piccadilly Circus for the 21st century,” according to Landsec’s head of commercialisation, Derek Manns, speaking at Campaign’s recent Brand Experience360.

“It’s a place that needed a bit more love,” added Manns. Below The Lights, which can hold at least 540 people for an event, is billed as ’a place for brands and people to play’. There are state-of-art audio-visual and lighting opportunities for brands “to come and make that space their own. It’s adaptable and flexible. We’ve listened to the market.” There is even the capability to stream an event live from Below The Lights on the Piccadilly Lights screens.

How to make the most of a venue

This should be a sensorial , interactive experience – touch, hear, see and, of course, feel. “It needs to feel more than just a passive viewing experience,” explained Paul Stanway, senior vice-president and executive creative director of 160/90, the cultural agency that is working with Landsec and Ocean Outdoor on Below The Lights.

“We have a saying at 160/90 that everything is experience and experience is everything,” said Stanway. “Brand experiences start long before the event begins. You have to think about every step on that journey, both physically and figuratively. How can you play on that sense of anticipation and use that to your advantage? How can you use the advertising sites and social media to build a sense of coherence and anticipation towards a crescendo?” 

Prime were on a mission to sell a billion bottles and devised a campaign where people registered online and were invited to Below The Lights at an appointed time during a 48-hour window for an immersive, interactive brand experience. Central to the experience was a gold bottle inside a glass case – guess the six-digit code and you’d win the bottle worth £400,000 ($500,000). A similar experience was simultaneously taking place in New York. 

“The whole thing was designed around a spectacle,” said Stanway. “There was a countdown – what’s going to happen? Who's going to win? Will anybody win? London versus New York. All sorts of interesting storytelling on a micro and macro level.”

With two hours to spare, a young boy, accompanied by his mother, guessed the code and won the bottle. No one was so fortunate in New York and the bottle was burned and melted in another explosive (literally) visual set piece.

“Being culturally relevant is really important when considering the venue and proposing it to a client,” said Stanway. “Every aspect of why, what, how and where needs to pull together for clients in order to help build a compelling story. You need to build a bridge between the brand, the venue and the audience. The venue should be a a character in that story because we want to make sure that this connection exists on more than a functional level.”

Why out-of-home is changing

Stanway urges brands to think about amplification and shareability, especially in the lead-up to an event. Phil Hall, UK CEO of Ocean Outdoor, agrees and is seeing the two worlds of out-of-home and brand experience collide. 

“At a time when many more people are avoiding or blocking ads we’re at the opposite end of that – we’re showcasing content and creating interactions with screens that consumers want to share” he said. 

As well as their partnership with Landsec, Ocean Outdoor also operates screens at Westfield, Canary Wharf and Battersea Power Station. “We've seen a real upsurge over the past couple of years of brands wanting to use screens to germinate an idea or to be central to a brand experience,” Hall said. 

“Across our portfolio of iconic locations we're increasingly seeing people buy the space not just for the audience that is physically present , but also to use it as a creative canvas where people can then share further and add value.”

Netflix used the BFI IMAX to promote the final season of their gritty drama Top Boy. “In one day, we had the physical audience of 450,000 and then within 24 hours more than a million people shared the experience through social.”

A Neuroscience study in Manchester revealed an 18% emotional uplift for brands that had ‘primed’ a social audience using digital out-of-home screens while dwell time for those posts increased by a huge 54%.

The power and capability of technology combined with the reach of social and the creative imagination of brands has led to a “dramatic reappraisal”, of Out Of Home in Hall’s words and has changed the way people engage with screens and spaces.