Tripping the #PiccadillyLights Fantastic

Ocean and our partners Land Securities this week revealed at The Café Royal in Piccadilly the latest plans for London’s new Piccadilly Lights to a small and exclusive number of global brands.

Piccadilly Circus, or Lights as we say, has held a significant place in the hearts and minds of Londoners and global citizens alike, ever since Perrier installed the first neon sign back in 1908.

Inspired thinking from the sparkling water brand to identify a location that would not only become the first and best known truly global advertising location on the planet, but also a location that would become one of London’s and the world’s best known tourist attractions. 

Since that eventful year, Piccadilly Lights has changed, developed and grown, constantly evolving and reflecting the zeitgeist of London. Autumn will reveal to the world the latest transformation of this location, reaffirming London’s position in the world as a genuine digital and media innovator.

Six hand picked brands from six exclusive commercial categories will dominate the location and use the very latest digital out of home technology to enhance their brand stories and create deep consumer engagement. 

There will not be another location on the planet that will have the technical specification of The New Piccadilly Lights.

The story of Piccadilly is a complex one for brands and the value to brand equity is extended by a huge multiple across a series of very modern metrics, giving brands an understanding of the value of association with a location that goes way beyond the media impact delivery. 

So here are a few numbers you might not know about Piccadilly:

The pure media impact delivery is phenomenal. Out of home industry research tool Route tells us that this single location will deliver an astonishing 387 million impacts per year. The significance of this figure is more impressive given that 51% of this audience are global citizens, the supreme priming location for the rapidly globalising world of brands.

The Lights are impressively the fourth most visited tourist location in London but incredibly, according to Sightsmap.com, they are the Number 1 most photographed tourist location. That’s images captured for prosperity.

The social profile of this location is also phenomenal. What advertising location delivers more than 200,000 Twitter impacts per day? With an extraordinary 29% of those Tweets including an image, again the priming effect of this one location is exponential.

 

Drilling deeper into the social conversation, we’ve discovered that 9/10 of the Tweet mentions are positive. What brand wouldn’t want a positive association with 9 out of 10 of its customers?

These numbers start to tell a story about Piccadilly that has never been told before and it’s a story that makes this location THE go to location for a small number of global brands that really want to create a deep and engaging relationship with the world.

The final number I can share is 379,000,000. That’s the estimated number of people who read, watched or heard about the Piccadilly Lights been turned off for their historic upgrade. 

Imagine what that number will look like when we turn the Lights back on in a few months time.