Coral Unveils Piccadilly Lights Campaign
British betting operator Coral has unveiled an innovative new advertising campaign ahead of the Cheltenham Festival. Its newly launched DeepScreen activation campaign will be shown on the world-famous Piccadilly Lights in London. The popular bookmaker hopes that the striking campaign will enable it to engage with wider audiences in time for one of the racing calendar’s biggest events of the year.
The curved screen in Piccadilly Circus creates ads that appear 3D. ©Andrzej Kidaj/Pexels
Dramatic Visuals
Coral has taken over London’s Piccadilly Lights just in time for the Cheltenham Festival. Its latest advertising campaign is titled “Your Horse”, and comes as the bookmaker’s first ever DeepScreen activation campaign. Coral worked closely with creative agency BBH London to come up with the eye-catching project.
The Piccadilly Lights are situated in the heart of London’s West End, in the iconic Piccadilly Circus. Measuring up at 783.5m2 and boasting a resolution 1.4x more than 4K, the iconic screen is the largest advertising display in Europe. Ads are rotated around the curved screen every 90 seconds, and every ten minutes one brand takes over the whole screen.
DeepScreen activations allow for ads that appear larger than life, with characters that virtually burst out of the screen. Forced perspective is used to warp 2D images so that they appear 3D. Coral has harnessed this innovative technology with its new campaign. Four jockeys race feverishly across the screen, fading out of view to reveal one horse that leaps out of the screen in slow motion.
Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the creative team responsible for the ad, aimed to capture the excitement and drama of horse racing through the cutting-edge medium. The display is sure to rev up excitement for the hotly-awaited races and drive fresh traffic to Coral’s online and high-street betting operations. Associate Creative Director at BBH, Guy Hobbs, described the thinking behind the ad, stating:
“This piece is based on the simple insight that when you’re watching a horse race, the only horse you’re really seeing is the one you’re backing. So our idea was to remove everything else on the racetrack except one single horse. And to do it in the most epic way possible using the DeepScreen.”
Groundbreaking Campaign
Coral is the first brand to ever fully utilize both the front and back technology of the DeepScreen. This has enabled it to create visuals that convey the speed and the motion of the racehorses. Coral’s 3D campaign was debuted on the eve of the 2022 Cheltenham Festival on the Piccadilly Lights and will appear once an hour for the week of the races.
A further media campaign, developed by the7stars features an OOH takeover of Cheltenham Spa station, as well as digital, print and social media. Racing fans across the UK will be able to take in Coral’s campaign for themselves, as it will be aired at other Ocean premium locations. These include Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Nottingham and Southampton.
This is not the first time that Coral has collaborated with the7stars. The content team previously worked with the bookmaker to produce “Against the Odds”, a documentary series for ITV. The ten-part series featured some of the channel’s leading sports broadcasters, as they looked at the lives athletes that had overcome adversity to rise to the top of their fields.
Coral’s Head of Brand Marketing, Chris Brocklehurst, was proud to finally be able to show off the ground-breaking campaign. By elevating the scale and drama of horse racing, he believes this campaign will bring racing fans closer to the action. As the first betting brand to utilize 3D poster technology, Coral has shown horse racing in a fresh and exciting light.
Melanie Blood from Ocean Labs, the company responsible for many of the UK’s most prominent OOH marketing screens, went into further detail about the benefits of DeepScreen technology. She said that the sheer scale of these screens provides the best advertising experiences, amplifying the prominence of campaigns. With its curved screen for 3D visuals, Piccadilly Lights is the epitome of what DeepScreen can offer.
Ready for Cheltenham
Coral is not the only sportsbook prepared to make the most of the Cheltenham Festival. Competitor Paddy Power has launched its own advertising campaign highlighting the horse racing event. The ad is filmed in Paddy Power’s characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, and features football legend Peter Crouch.
The two-minute ad sees the former Tottenham and Liverpool striker lose a bet with his wife, after taking a tip from horseracing expert Mark Chapman. As per the terms of the bet, Crouch must do the dreaded washing up. Still wearing his rubber gloves, Crouch pursues Chapman, suspicious that he has been victim of a bad tip.
It emerges that Crouch could have won the bet if only he’d listened to Chapman’s advice properly and placed an “each way” wager. The ad, aired across the bookmaker’s social media channels, marks the latest in long line of humorous and sometimes controversial campaigns from Paddy Power.
Online betting platform SBK opted for a different approach to raise its profile ahead of the Cheltenham Festival. It launched its own content hub, made up of writers, brand ambassadors, podcasts and previews, called the SBK Betting Zone. Smarkets powered SBK hopes to use its increased platform to offer customers the latest tips and insights.
Contributions come from a variety of sports writers, as well as the bookmaker’s own brand ambassadors. These include famous jockeys Sean Levey, Nicola Currie and Tom Bellamy, as well as trainer George Boughey. Jess Stafford of Racing TV has also come on board to host the SBK Betting Podcast, alongside Ross Millar, James Millman and Tom Collins.
This year’s Cheltenham Festival opened on March 15th and will run until March 18th. Since 1815, the racing festival in the heart of the Cotswolds has enticed racing fans from around the world. Over four days 28 races take place, including 14 Grade 1 events. More than 200,000 fans attend the event, which culminates with the legendary Gold Cup Day.
