Weekly Round Up
#1 Glastonbury’s Shangri-La creates VR music and arts festival Lost Horizon
Not all summer festivals are cancelled this year, we still have Glastonbury! Sort of. Glastonbury have partnered up with VRJAM and Sansar to create the mind bending Shangri-La virtual and mixed-reality festival. The virtual festival will transport guests into a new replica arena, with 4 VR stages featuring over 50 music acts and over 100 DJs and artists. Plus, there will of course be dance floors, secret gigs and computer-generated avatars and green-screen “hologram” performances. We’ll be checking it out on the 3rd-4th July, tickets are free and the festival will be streaming across a variety of devices and platforms.
In the absence of (physical) music festivals this year, we’ve taken a trip down memory lane. Take a read of our top festival moments, where we include everything from proposals, secret parties, backstage hangs and best moments from live events!
#2 How brands should lead through change, during and after coronavirus
The uncertainty over the past few months has thrown marketing strategies into turmoil. We’ve seen our client’s budgets pause, drop and even increase, to maintain brand presence, in response to the restrictions imposed for Covid-19. A recent round table, hosted by Marketing Week and Salesforce, provided useful insight around how brands should react and respond during this time of uncertainty. Read more around the experience shared, such as company status categorisation into ‘freeze mode’, ‘flex mode’, or ‘fix mode’.
#3 Diageo helps people ‘connect’
While not all of us have seen each other as much as we would like over the past few months, there has been a higher demand for more personalised gifts, as a way of bringing people together and adding a special touch. We love Diageo’s new ‘message in a bottle’ concept, it’s really smart and fun way to help people connect. They’ve teamed up with The Whiskey Shop to offer the personalised gift, which includes a bottle of Single Malt Scotch Whiskey with a QR code on the label. When scanned, the code shows a 30-second video incorporating personalised messages and pictures. This one has launched just in time for Father’s Day, but we’re expecting to see more of these digital tool integrations into gifts (and activations) beyond 2020.
#4 Coronavirus: Ceredigion museum makes quarantine quilts
Ceredigion Museum in Aberystwyth has an exceptional collection of quilts that display social history and past events. When the museum reopens it will be adding a real quilt and a digital one to its collection, to commemorate the community’s experience of the pandemic and lockdown. The inventive team are inviting people to help create “quarantine quilts” by sharing their coronavirus experiences, whether that is through photography, videos, songs and poetry, or physical fabrics. Anyone can apply; the museum hope to feature people from across the country, including key workers, teachers or kids sharing their experiences, their newly learned skills or crafts and virtual events they attended.
#5 You can help a Mars Rover’s AI learn to tell rocks from dirt
Many of us have developed new hobbies or skills over the last few months, here’s one we bet you never thought you could add to the list – NASA scientist! The Mars Rover (named Curiosity) has been roaming the red planet for eight years and now you can help teach the Rover how to classify Martian terrain. NASA have created a system called Soil Property and Object Classification (SPOC), and you can help label raw data that will feed into the rovers terrain scanning AI. There are thousands of images from Mars uploaded to Zooniverse, and after reading through the tutorial, anyone can annotate them. So why not get involved help make history.
If you have any positive news stories that would look right at home in this list, send them through to info@marbleldn.com.