When Roku determined to move to SXSW for the primary time, it didn’t simply convey a small group—it created a whole purple-drenched metropolis occupied by pleasant monsters. And it began with one well-known screensaver.
For March 11-12, the streaming platform invited festivalgoers inside Roku Metropolis, an immersive look into the colourful cityscape recognized by Roku customers. The interactive, multilevel pop-up allowed guests to walk by components of the favored metropolis as big robots walked concerning the city (from the protection of a projection display, naturally).
On the heart of the bustling exercise was a partnership with Greatest Purchase that continues to increase each within the model’s imaginary world and the real-life retail house.
“We share an ethos with Greatest Purchase. Each corporations are entertainment- and consumer-obsessed,” Julian Mintz, Roku’s co-head of U.S. model gross sales, informed Adweek. “There actually was nobody else that we thought of when it comes to partnering to convey all of this nice entertaining content material to life.”
Welcome to city
In keeping with the model, the SXSW expertise was developed from Twitter analysis exhibiting that the screensaver was talked about as soon as each 12 minutes. Inner analysis additionally confirmed that 2 out of three customers would really go to the town if given the chance. Lately, Roku Metropolis was even the topic of a New York Instances deep dive.
“We debuted Roku Metropolis in 2017,” Mintz defined. “The entire aim of it was to shock and delight our viewers, to actually immerse them in leisure and to spark their creativeness. Immediately, it turned successful and it’s solely develop into increasingly more widespread.”
The formidable Downtown Austin house encompassed plenty of completely different scenes wherein guests may actually insert themselves, together with a magnificence salon the place company may get flower crowns and face jewels, and a rooftop diner with bookable cubicles by OpenTable. The model even replicated Paris’ Pont des Arts—also called the Love Lock Bridge—by giving company a lock that they may dedicate to their real love and safe on the bridge to the following room.
