Projection mapping, another tool for advertisers and marketers

Projection mapping has the potential to revolutionise night-time marketing and advertising, offering a unique and captivating approach that can engage audiences and leave a lasting impression. This technology’s versatility and adaptability make it an attractive option for a wide range of marketing objectives, from raising brand recognition to promoting new products and services.

Projected media is flexible, from building projections to interactive displays, immersive environments, product exhibitions, and guerrilla marketing. Coca-Cola, Nike, Disney, Hyundai, and Scottish Widows have already leveraged projection mapping in their marketing initiatives, creating unforgettable experiences and imagery that draw attention and generate brand awareness.

The innovative projection mapping techniques have transformed how we think about night-time marketing and advertising. Projections enable advertisers to create an engaging and aesthetically pleasing experience that can turn any surface into a dynamic display using specialised software and projectors. Advertisers are likewise employing projections in TV commercials production.

We’ll take a closer look at how projection mapping alters the marketing and advertising world.

Multimedia content shines with projection mapping.

As technology advances — laser projectors get brighter, smaller and lighter — future projection mapping applications evolve even more innovative. As a result, it is transforming the marketing and publicity landscape. It is a powerful means for advertisers to create vibrant and visually stunning presentations that captivate audiences and deliver messages effectively — containing an authentic mixed bag of content from live-action, prerecorded videos to AI-generated animations. It can even form parts of laser and aerial drone light shows.

What is Projection Mapping?

Projection mapping is a technology that beams images onto a 3D surface, such as a building, statue, or vehicle. The graphics are carefully mapped onto the surface to create the appearance of depth and movement. Projection mapping can produce various effects, from simple colour changes to complex animations that react to sound or motion — full-blown audio-visual on a massive scale.

One of the critical advantages of projection mapping in advertising is its ability to provide viewers with a unique and memorable experience. Advertisers can create a sense of awe and surprise by projecting images onto a surface, which can be challenging to do with traditional advertising methods. In addition, projection mapping is excellent at telling stories to deliver a message in exciting and memorable ways by transforming mundane objects into immersive backdrops.

Another benefit of projection mapping is its versatility in advertising. Many marketing goals include increasing brand awareness and promoting new products and services. Additionally, projection mapping is an excellent choice for events and public spaces — indoors or outdoors — as long as it’s dark!

Large-Scale Events and Projection Mapping

One of the most striking applications of projection mapping in advertising is for large-scale events such as product launches, concerts, and festivals. Advertisers can create an immersive experience that captures the attention of a large audience by projecting graphics onto a structure or stage. For example, a car manufacturer might use projection mapping to design a dynamic display that highlights the features of their latest model, or a music festival may employ it to create a visual backdrop that enhances the musicians’ performances.

Projected Media Applications in Advertising and Marketing

Projection media is versatile and adaptable technology depending on the marketing goals and target audience. Here are some examples of projected media possibilities in advertising:

Building Projections: Images or videos can be projected onto the sides of buildings using projection media, creating a visually stunning display that is visible to a large audience. This can be particularly useful for promoting special events or product launches, as the projection can generate excitement and anticipation.

Immersive Environments: Projections create 360° environments that immerse viewers in another time or place. For instance, a travel agency might use projection media to create a virtual tour of a destination, giving visitors a sense of what it would be like to be there. Or transform buildings into anything you could imagine, a rocket launch, waterfall, rainforest.

Guerrilla Marketing: Projections delivered in unexpected locations or unconventional times as part of guerrilla marketing campaigns utilising projection media. This provokes curiosity and surprise, creating buzz and increasing brand awareness.

Interactive Shows: Interactive displays that engage viewers and encourage them to interact with the brand. For instance, a car manufacturer might use projection media to create a simulated test drive experience where viewers can sit in a car and drive along a projected road.

Product Exhibitions: Products can be presented in a unique and eye-catching way using projection media. For example, a fashion brand might use projections to create a digital catwalk that showcases its latest collection exhilaratingly.

In-store marketing: Transform night-time shop windows into anything you could envision without the cost of physical displays. Create holographic effects to intrigue customers.

Environmental Impacts and Benefits of Projected Marketing

Laser projectors are many times more energy efficient than conventional bulb-powered units. In addition, a laser machine has a lifespan of over 20,000 hours. In contrast, the lamp life on a projector can be as low as 2,500 hours — thus, reducing its environmental impact.

Creating large-scale imagery on an existing structure has far less impact than printed signage — and requires more minor infrastructure needs than LED-type screen installations.

Mobile projection offers quick, flexible setups for Guerrilla Marketing Projects. Often these are powered by battery units, making them quiet and environmentally sound.

Like to know more about projection mapping?

Overall, projection media provides a unique and captivating approach to advertising products and services, creating unforgettable experiences that can attract a large audience. In addition, due to its adaptability and flexibility, projection media is becoming an increasingly popular choice for companies looking to stand out in a crowded advertising market.

Like to know more?
Please call 020 7100 7323 or email today.

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Street projection illuminates artists working within their community

It’s fantastic to be out on the road again, this time helping ACME studios showcase their work supporting artists with affordable studio space in London. The event formed part of the #wearelewisham. Lewisham is The Mayor’s London Borough of Culture 2022.

Our Projections and lighting transformed ACME’s Childers Street building — a 1920s built former ship propeller foundry situated in London near Deptford — home to over 120 working artists. The mobile projection unit, parked in Rolt Street, delivered tens of thousands of lumens — projection mapping the artists work onto the building and the surrounding streetscape.

Projection mapping — working out light levels and projection throws.

We only had access to the studios in the daylight hours immediately before the event, and we knew the setup timeframes would be very tight. This required detailed reccies and careful planning. All the projection throws had to be worked out in advance, and permissions granted to locate our projection vehicle opposite the venue.

Having an urban locale meant the ambient light levels were relatively high. Consequently, we had to use high powered projectors to give the needed standout. Fixing temporary reflective panels also helped with the image clarity.

We also projected across the street from inside one of the studio spaces, creating a showcase of Artist work to help kick off this 2022 cultural event.

Projection content development, editing and mapping

The projected content included a wide selection of work by artists, some specially commissioned, in many mediums. Photographic portraits of artists working within their spaces, combined images of previous open studio events, helped convey the depth and breadth of work within the building. We were bringing what happens inside the building to an outside audience. Shedding light to neighbours or the casual passers-by intrigued to know what goes on behind the studio’s doors!

It was fantastic working with the ACME team and the Artists. Great to see their reactions to witnessing their work on a tremendous scale!

Like to know more?
Please call 020 7100 7323 or email today.

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Designing a perfect presentation — PowerPoint template branding is critical.

Looking good in PowerPoint is all about understanding masters and your templates — combined with simplicity and design flair!

We work with lots of corporate PowerPoint guidelines that struggle to work in a real-world context. Often promoting overly fussy or overcomplicated presentation designs — frustrating both seasoned presenters and occasional users. And they positively don’t project the right image!

The financial costs in personnel time — often senior — struggling with badly design templates remains overlooked, wasting valuable time and resulting in poor looking presentations, which the branding guidelines are supposed to resolve.

Corporate PowerPoint template branding and design — Does and Don’t

Usually, presentation templates are an afterthought in the branding process, shoved to the back of the design queue — tasked to a graphic artist who has never worked within the presentation or events industry. These designers often have limited experience of PowerPoint — finding it clumsy and frustrating to use when compared to professional design applications. Insufficient knowledge of PowerPoint’s functionality often results in problematic templates.

A presentation specialist is much more qualified when rebranding templates. They will know little tricks to get the best from PowerPoint.

How do you create a great PowerPoint template?

The most helpful feature within PowerPoint is the slide ‘master layout templates’ and ‘placeholders’. Slide masters allow you to style sets of standard master layouts, e.g. bullets slides, charts, images and text.

These layout masters help to dictate the overall appearance (branding) of your slides and positioning of text and tables. Information such as the font choice, styling, sizing, colourways and palettes can be embedded too.

Background image designs, logos become automatically placed in the correct position on each slide. No more headings and logos are jumping around the screen. A consistent look to charts and tables make any organisation look their best. Getting these layouts set-up and branded corrected will save hours!

Working efficiently with PowerPoint

Understanding PowerPoint slide masters function is key to working quickly and efficiently. Most presentation sent to us appears to bypass using master templates. Many users avoid the slide master, mainly due to inadequate training or unfamiliarity with the software.

Most PowerPoint users appear to type text into the first blank slide in the file, then start adding freeform text boxes and pasting charts in from other applications. Then duplicate this slides in the sorter to create yet more poorly formatted layouts, rather than creating new slides and selecting the appropriate designs.

This approach is inefficient and full of error traps. It’s easy to make mistakes. Text sizing goes astray, wrong fonts from pasted in copy appear on your slides. Misalignments issues with logos and graphics make your slides look disjointed — very unprofessional — not right!

How to use PowerPoint masters

For PowerPoint to be able to apply correct styles automatically to content, i.e. fonts, colours, design. Text and images should go into the master Placeholders fields. These are the pre-defined text, image and chart boxes with dotted borders on the blank slide layouts.

Text inserted into these master Placeholders is resettable within the layouts. Making everything line-up and stay in registration and adopting your templates branding.

Apply slide master to existing presentations

Reapplying a new design to an existing slide deck is remarkably quick if correctly formatted using masters and placeholders. That’s why they are there!

Just insert slides from an old styled presentation, choose Reuse Slides from the bottom of the menu that appears. Browse your computer to find the file containing the slides you want to import, and select the file and click Open. Automatically they will be formatted to a new style.

Any elements such as text, graphics or charts pasted directly into a slide in custom text boxes. Will not adopt the branding characteristics (fonts, colours and especially layout) defined in the layout master. Only the text assigned to placeholders will take the correct formatting.

Corporate PowerPoint branding services

Having your corporate presentation templates set-up and designed by us will undoubtedly save time. You’ll benefit from great-looking presentations that are quick and easy to format. The savings in time can be vast for any organisation.

Online PowerPoint training

We offer a full webinar training service for end-users. These sessions run through how to work with slide master and general formatting within PowerPoint. Plus tips on the best design practice for creating stunning presentations.

And for that ‘unique’ presentation or big pitch — a full visualisation, design and animation service is recommended!