At 309 metres high The Shard dominates the London skyline. And broadcast coverage of the opening of the public viewing gallery, The View from The Shard, in early 2013 has dominated the airwaves thanks to markettiers4dc.
Following our International broadcast outreach around the iconic building’s inauguration in July 2012 which delivered over two thousand items of broadcast coverage, we were asked by Kallaway PR to help them build excitement before and during the opening of The View from The Shard.
For two months our goal was to create awareness in the UK and around the world and so drive ticket sales. Having had phenomenal success six months earlier with gaining record amounts of global coverage for the inauguration by Prince Andrew, our job was to re-engage with those media contacts to ensure they bought into this next phase of the building's construction.
Working with lead agency Kallaway, we escorted 50 TV, radio and online crews over 4 days at the start of January to film and report from The View from The Shard, a dizzying 244m above the capital on the 72nd floor open-air viewing platform.
As well as offering them unrestricted access for an embargoed sneak preview of the amazing facility and its stunning views we also shot and edited B-Roll footage to augment broadcasters’ own material.
When the preview embargo lifted on Friday 11th January, coverage appeared on TV and online channels across the globe, including Australia, Brazil, Germany, Israel, Russia, Mexico, USA and here in the UK with reports on ITV Daybreak, BBC London, ITV1 News, Channel 4 and Channel 5. Several online news outlets covered the story using our B-Roll, including – The Guardian , Wall Street Journal, Mail Online and Huffington Post.
The second phase of our global broadcast outreach was to maximise coverage of the opening by Mayor of London Boris Johnson. Our strategy was twofold; to work with a limited number of key broadcasters to cover the event themselves and to create B-Roll and distribute globally to the many more broadcasters whom we would not be able to accommodate.
As well as having a crew on hand to film the opening ceremony, interview the Mayor, the developer Irvine Sellar and the attraction’s CEO Anders Nyberg, plus vox-pops with the first customers, we also had exclusive access to the star-studded launch party the night before. This enabled us to broaden the appeal beyond News, Travel and Business programming and cover off Entertainment slots as well.
We combined the on-the-day footage and interview clips with stunning aerial shots and views both to and from The Shard we had pre filmed in glorious sunshine in case the weather on the day did not give the crews attending the shots they would have liked to get themselves. This proved to be a wise decision as launch day dawned grey and drizzling.
The updated B-Roll was edited and approved within 3 hours of the opening and fed to Reuters who in turn immediately distributed it to all their 640+ TV station subscribers and 1000+ online newsrooms around the globe.
Within 72 hours our monitoring had identified hundreds of items of international broadcast coverage in dozens of different countries.
This was boosted by the coverage delivered by our work with the dozen carefully selected broadcasters that were invited to cover the event itself. Working with Kallaway PR we identified key broadcasters in all of their target markets to maximise coverage in those countries. As well as the BBC, Sky and ITN, LBC and BBC 5 live from the UK, global broadcasters Euronews (multilingual), CCTV (Chinese & English), Deutsche Welle (German & Arabic), Al Arabiya (Arabic) were all invited and key broadcasters from individual countries: FR2 (France) Nippon TV (Japan) and ARD (Germany).
Sustained global coverage was tracked for the following 5 days and in total the coverage headlines for the 2 phases of our January work make impressive reading; four hundred separate verified items of coverage on 115 different broadcast channels in 25 countries including CNN, Fox News, NBC, Al Jazeera, Channel News Asia, RTL, TF1, NTV, Russia Today, RAI. In the US a dozen local TV stations picked up the footage from the networks and in Germany alone 17 different TV stations ran the story.