FMBE winners 2022: Most Effective Shareable Brand Experience

Award presented by Andrew Bodwick, SpaceandPeople. FMBE’s Frank Wainwright collected the award for Factory 42, who could not attend on the night.

It was a category that saw the gold and silver winners of the previous category demoted to bronze and silver. If you have read the Integration/Amplification, write up you’ll know how strong these two are. So, what did it take to beat them as a shareable experience.

BRONZE Hopper and Clarion Communications – Aldi

See Integration/ Amplification category

SILVER We Are Collider – Arcane

See Integration/ Amplification category

GOLD Factory 42 – The Green Planet

The Green Planet AR Experience was always likely to be box office. The raw materials alone from BBC Studio’s magnificent series would make it so.

Factory 42 led a top-class consortium to make this experience, in a fully reskinned listed building looking out on Regent Street in the heart of Piccadilly, London.

The experience was DCMS funded and powered by EE 5G. That meant a big budget was available – a budget that came with extremely high expectation.

Visitors at the sold-out experience walked through a series of biomes equipped with a Samsung 21+ phone to engage with the augmented reality experiential and interactive storytelling.

Multiple technologies were used to good effect. Google’s Cloud Anchor allowed seamless interaction between visitors and digital content, such as getting a butterfly to land on the visitor’s hands. Dimension Studio’s mobile studio was used to capture broadcast quality sound for Sir David Attenborough’s performance as a holographic event host. EE’s 5G enabled 48 handsets to be concurrently running over Unity in real time.

This was all achieved whilst setting industry leading standards in sustainability. Because sustainability was a core message of the project it was also monitored post event with good evidence of behavioural change.

FMBE Judges felt that the experience redefined AR shareability and the quality of the event saw masses of media coverage with a combined 318 million reach.

This showcasing of a national treasure, Sir David, and the high-quality production also appealed to another national treasure, Stephen Fry, whose attendance at the event gave it further waves of publicity. He rated The Green Planet AR Experience ‘stunning’.