360 degree capture is a great way to advertise a holiday, and the industry doesn’t even need to shoot it itself.
That’s what hotel chain St. Giles Hotels is experimenting with this month. As reported by AdWeek, the company is launching a contest in partnership with creative outlet Piranha that will allow it to leverage the best 360 degree footage shot not by a professional studio but instead by holiday makers themselves.
You can head to a St. Giles website now to fill out a form that will enter you into the competition. A total of 30 people will then win a one-night stay in one of six hotels, based in New York, London, Sydney, Penang, Kuala Lumpur and Manila in late July. These winners will be given a new Samsung Gear 360 camera – which is only just starting to roll out to people – and will be sent off into their respective cities to shoot content in 360 degrees. Expect plenty of shots from the top of the Empire State Building and outside of Big Ben.
This content isn’t for scrap booking, though. Instead, St Giles will cut the footage and then use it in a digital and social campaign launching this September. A dedicated app will be launching to view the footage through Google Cardboard, though the use of the Gear 360 would suggest that you’ll also be able to watch it through Samsung’s Gear VR. Gear 360 is specifically designed for use with Samsung’s latest smartphones, the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge and is one of the first 360 cameras to be aimed at the consumer market.
It might sound like a good way to get some free advertising, but St Giles’ competition shows how brands are taking the advent of VR seriously, especially within the travel industry. Using a VR HMD viewers will be able to look all around a captured area as if they were there for themselves. You can imagine effective a tool this could be for marketing holidays; the fact that companies don’t even need to put the time and resources aside to shoot the content themselves just makes it all the more enticing.
