Used in the right way, print is a powerful medium for advertising. While almost any brand can make use of print effectively, some businesses naturally lend themselves to effective printed campaigns – Electric Playbox demonstrated this to great effect when they employed PressOn to create a visual teaser for their new store opening.
Who are Electric Gamebox?
Founded by Will Dean & David Spindler – the men who launched Tough Mudder and the Tough Mudder Bootcamp franchise respectively, Electric Gamebox (formerly Electric Playbox) is “founded on the belief that technology should bring people together versus driving them apart.”
Capitalising on the waves of developments in digital technology, Electric Gamebox offer immersive gaming experiences, featuring a combination of
projection mapping, touch screens, motion tracking and surround sound. Each game takes place in a square ‘box’ room, and offers players of all ages a chance to experience a unique gaming challenge.
The project:
While Electric Gamebox’s offering is unique, exciting, and captivating, it’s also cutting-edge. Concepts like this are extremely fresh, and so in order to spread the word of their new store launch at Manchester Arndale, Electric Playbox decided to use an altogether more traditional advertising medium: print.
Shopping Centres offer something of a blank canvas for large format print campaigns, with a huge variety of surfaces and locations ideally situated to reach the thousands of people who visit the mall each day. With the right print medium, campaigns like this can also be immersive in their own right, capturing attention from a variety of locations and sources – making it the perfect match for Electric Gamebox’s immersive, spatial experiences.
The prints:
For this campaign, several different surfaces and locations were identified as being particularly suitable. In total, PressOn created a large wall graphic, 17 balustrade panels, a set of escalator graphics, and 3 sets of pillar graphics. Once in place, the variety of prints ensured consistent visibility for the brand amongst visitors to Arndale, reinforcing their messaging, and increasing curiosity about the new store.
The wall graphic, the largest and most prominent of the graphics PressOn created, was situated on a walkway which led to the area in which the new store was located – perfectly placed to draw the attention of passersby. This was compounded by the fact that the graphic itself was huge, measuring 10.5m wide, by 2.8m tall. It was printed onto removable vinyl with a matte laminate, to ensure it not only looked pristine, but could be taken down at the end of the campaign easily.
The escalator and balustrade graphics were installed onto glass surfaces, and so a different substrate was used – PressOn opted for a double-sided vinyl, to ensure that the graphics could be easily seen on both sides of the glazing.
In addition to this, three pillars were chosen as surfaces for the campaign, and for these, PressOn used vinyl mounted to semi-rigid PVC, ensuring a clean, smooth finish around the diameter of the pillars themselves.
A Swift installation…
Due to the health and safety regulations in place in most shopping centres, graphics often need to be installed when the public aren’t present. This means turnaround times are tight, and installations tend to take place at night, after the shopping mall itself has closed. PressOn installed the graphics into Arndale in August, in the course of a single evening – fortunately, our team of installers are experts at getting these kinds of graphics into place quickly and effectively.
Making an impression with print
While campaigns like this are temporary, they’re a fantastic way of ensuring maximum visibility and generating interest in something like a new store launch. Electric Gamebox used bright colours and visuals to create excitement and anticipation for the new opening, and brought both their branding and the immersive nature of their offering into the 3D space within Arndale.
While the pandemic has wrought havoc on businesses in 2020, with the print campaign they ran with PressOn, Electric Gamebox are certain to have made a lasting impression on visitors to the mall.
