The IMAX, Waterloo

The IMAX, Europe’s largest canvas, sits at the core of Ocean’s super-premium out-of-home portfolio (alongside Europe’s largest screen: our very own Piccadilly Lights). Its size and unique position deliver an incredible 4.5 million impacts every year.

As our Neuroscience research proves, iconic sites such as The IMAX prime all other OOH advertising activity, ensuring higher levels of emotional intensity and memory encoding. Even with the same creative executions, premium sites such as The IMAX perform better, energising the impact of the creative. As the most spectacular sites particularly impact the right brain they have far more of an emotional impact – and that’s something we know our latest innovation at The IMAX is delivering.

So how could we possibly improve on a site that already delivers highly desirable audiences that include selective media consumers and therefore hard-to-reach segments?

  • Light TV viewers 144
  • Light radio listeners 109
  • Heavy Economist readers 426
  • Heavy cinema goers 144

That’s where Ocean Labs enter the picture. Always looking years ahead, they’re the people that deliver on the most technologically advanced campaigns that Ocean brings to market and their recent work on The IMAX’s lighting is just one example.


Meet Edison

Ocean’s Edison technology is the bright, beautiful, shiny icing on the biggest cake you’ve ever seen.

With 48,000 LEDs over this 1,734m² canvas, brands have the chance to introduce spectacular effects and eye-catching displays that bring their creative to life. Edison is a totally dynamic and programmable lighting system with a full RGB spectrum that allows advertisers to use every colour possible, no matter what Pantone has just chosen as colour of the year.

From transport and telecoms through to automotive and lifestyle, The IMAX is a must-buy for any category and our Edison lighting technology allows creatives to let their imagination run riot. Here are just a few of the brightest and boldest pre- and post-Edison campaigns that we’ve celebrated at Ocean.


Our Edison highlights

Live during the latest London Lumière displays, the VW T-Roc Edison display arguably stole some of Lumière’s thunder in 2018, with a spectacular rainbow display of colour.

Using Edison technology EE turned the Apple Watch into the hero of their creative, ensuring all eyes were on the star of the show.

‘Do you believe in more?’ was the question asked by Nike and FKA twigs in their creative collaboration, as Edison selectively lit up sections of FKA twigs’ thought-provoking portrait.

Virgin Trains used Edison to create a sense of motion through a horizontal transition technique around the IMAX. Promoting their ‘Be Bound for Glory’ positioning they targeted existing and new travellers around Waterloo, advertising destinations such as Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow.


Edison and special LED syncs

Nothing ‘Beats’ seeing your own face all over The IMAX. Or at least we’d imagine there’s nothing better, but you’d have to check with Anthony Joshua; his helicopter flight from Cardiff to London featured a tour over The IMAX, complete with his Beats ‘Above The Noise’ endorsement featuring a special Edison and LED lighting sync.

A favourite amongst automotive brands due to its iconic status, The IMAX played host to VW’s ‘Cool. Calm. Connected’ campaign with an Edison and special LED sync that couldn’t fail to draw attention.

Released in 2016 and targeting a youth audience, Huawei wanted to their Honor 8 advertising campaign to make a splash. And it certainly did with this Edison/LED special.

Combining Edison and custom LED headlights, Ford created an attention-grabbing campaign that made the headlights on their Mustang, Edge SUV and GT models light up, encouraging consumers to ‘unlearn’ what they knew of the Ford brand.


Pre-Edison and we’re still proud of them

We can all get caught up chasing after the next shiny (48,000 LED!) thing and we’d be remiss if we left out some of the best pre-Edison work. Creativity sits at the heart of digital out-of-home and these three campaigns made an impact even before our lighting got exciting.

Adidas brought their #BeTheDifference campaign to life on The IMAX, with special LED lighting that made their football boots and copy stand out to everyone who passed.

Using LED mesh Samsung delivered the ultimate creative IMAX experience, imitating live action moments captured on the Galaxy S4.

The wearable that started it all. Nike launched their FuelBand in spectacular fashion with this IMAX takeover, featuring LED lighting for the FuelBand’s interface.


Conclusion

Technology moves quickly. Some of our most ground-breaking pre-Edison LED campaigns were only from as recently as 2014. That’s why Ocean and Ocean Labs are constantly investing in innovations that deliver the best our advertisers need.