So we hit our first properly big birthday in the summer, as you might have seen.
Can’t believe we’re a decade down, though so much has changed in that time too. We’re putting together some thoughts on what the latest trends and current opportunities are, but for now we wanted to take a quick look back with one of our favourite campaigns selected from each year of our existence so far.
2009 – Stephen King’s Under the Dome: A Hidden Masterpiece
Supporting our partners for nearly the whole decade Unity PR we orchestrated the world’s largest game of literary hide and seek, digitalising all 5,000 segments of Stephen King’s biggest book in 20 years and asked people to hide them both online and in the real world and then leave a clue via their social channels in return for a chance to win a signed copy of the book.
2010 – Pizza Express: Create Your Own Masterpiece
Again working with Unity, we set Britain’s most loved pizza restaurant up with its first integrated PR and social strategy and then directed their first ever nationwide competition for people to submit recipes for a new addition to the menu. 50,000 entries then led to a short-list of 10 that pitted the carnivores against the vegans, the thin and crispies against the doughboys for a final online vote.
2011 – The Estate of the Artist Francis Bacon online
This was the start of our longest-standing client relationship, promoting the work of Britain’s greatest 20th Century artist across digital channels and consolidating disparate channels for the art, the Estate and the commercial operations into one set of profiles, feeding the blog and monthly newsletter.
2012 – Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City
The first of our extended immersive realityexperiences, we launched the latest instalment of the original zombie franchise with a challenge to journos and superfans to take on hordes of augmented reality zombies, that then turned into real ones and chased them back to HQ. Which had been taken over by an end of level boss that they had to try to take down for real.
2013 – Coca-Cola Connect
The first of several campaigns we have supported the most recognisable brand in the world on, this was the first opportunity consumers had outside of Australia to get a can or bottle with their name on it. We took the central concept and built the named cans into a visual signifier of summer socialising for central, south and eastern Europe, asking people to tag their Coke moments to build up a personalised social aggregator featuring their friends.
2014 – Time Run: The Lance of Longinus
The launch of our own escape game experience in East London that was to run for four years and become the most critically acclaimed in town, combining cinematic production values with a deep narrative and some nifty interaction design to take people through three inter-connected periods and scenarios in their hour of time travel.
2015 – Ribena: Tropicoliday
A truly integrated campaign for the UK’s favourite purple drink, consumers were invited by three top YouTubers to discover a golden pineapple inside the cap of their selected drink in order to win a place on a pop-up gameshow that they then filmed and broadcast for us.
2016 – Direct Line: Direct Fix
A surprise and delight social campaign that listend out for people in need for solution to their daily woes, which would then be delivered by an on-call street team in cities across the UK. ‘Fixes’ included sending out tents to washed-out festival goers, specially knitted car jumpers to early frost sufferers and replacing people’s burnt turkeys on Christmas Day.
2017 – Eden Project: Alien Encounter
An invitation to the thousands of people that visit the famous biomes of the West Country’s top tourist destination to track down a series of runes dropped by a crashed alien ship, then work together to decipher their meaning and enter the inner chamber of the ship where they could try to find its pilot and find out what they were doing visiting Earth.
2018 – Honor Mobile: Escape with Honor
We launched the newest smart-phone from Huawei’s youth brand via an escape game with twenty puzzles that only the 20 Pro could solve demonstrating its top features in the process and taking them across three floor’s of London’s most tech inspired hotel, the M by Montcalm.
2019 – Incubus XR
The second of our extended reality horror experiences at the Vault Festival, people were invited to realise their true potential by exploring their sub-conscious in virtual reality, only to find their id coming after them when they returned to ‘base reality’.
And then this is where we’ve called home for the last 10 years in our hobo journey around London.
So that’s it for now. Well, we had to be strict with ourselves and not get too over-excited, even if it is our birthday. But we are excited for many more to come, especially as the landscape continues to evolve at mutate. And we’ll then bang on a bit more about them here.
When we find the time, at least. Sorry for that in advance…