Helping W Hotels earn a bike-load of cultural credibility
A campaign to make W Hotels the talk of the town
When W hotels asked us to help them get closer to the London music, art and design scenes, we knew just what to do. London’s soon-to-be iconic Boris Bikes had just launched, but they were a bit… dull for us. So we invited design luminaries like Ron Arad, Paloma Faith, Patrick Cox, Alice Temperley and Benedict Radcliffe to design their own, one-off bikes and present them at a huge launch party in London.
The PR impact was massive. “Riding” (ahem) on the trending coat-tails of the Boris Bikes, we earned W Hotels column inches in Vogue, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, The Observer Magazine and more. After the launch, the bikes were made available to W Hotel Guests to ride around London, for free, for a whole month, before they were all auctioned off with proceeds going to the Elton John AIDS foundation, inspiring a whole new round of press.
The extreme riding video we made in advance of the launch party was W Hotel’s most successful piece of online content.
“Don’t Panic expertly executed a complicated idea which resulted in an engaging guest experience”.
– Simon Warrington, W Hotels