Virgin Media Infinity Room
Client
Virgin Media
Industry
Telco
Category
DOOH, video production
Some briefs are about telling people what a space is. This one was about convincing them it was even open.
In 2023, Virgin Media were building a new gaming space at The O2 across the first and second floors. While that went up, they turned the ground floor into an awareness space for their new streaming platform, Stream from Virgin Media, and built an infinity room at the heart of it: an immersive installation of mirrored walls, lights and reflective surfaces that makes a small room feel boundless, your reflection and the lights multiplying in every direction. Dressed in Stream’s icons and colours, it was designed to feel as endless as the platform it was promoting.
The problem was that nobody knew it was there. With the gaming space still under construction around it, people walking through The O2 could not tell the ground floor was open, or that there was anything inside it worth stopping for. The ones who did wander in loved it. The client’s brief was simply to fix that: build awareness, get people through the door and using the room as part of their night out. They had no way to advertise it, so I led the creative on a set of digital out-of-home assets to showcase the space and explain it, plus a version for the space’s tickertape.
The creative challenge was doing all of that in ten seconds. The ad had to land what the room was, where it was, what you could do inside it and why it was worth your time, without the elements fighting each other. So rather than cram, I leaned into the aesthetic. The neon and mirrors already felt like the early Nineties, so we built a high-energy, ten-second piece that played like a Nineties music video: a young cast experiencing the room, quick cuts and handheld camera work and immersive motion graphics carrying the key messages, all of it making the room feel as essential to a night at The O2 as the pre-drinks beforehand.
The tight budget shaped the whole production. Casting is where this kind of shoot usually overruns, so we were careful and disciplined, and still landed a young cast of six. I wanted to do as much as possible in camera rather than fake the energy in the edit, which is harder in a room made entirely of mirrors, so we worked through pairs, solos and groupings and a lot of different setups to get there. It gave us far more to work with in the edit than the budget had any right to.
Working in the space also unlocked things the storyboard could not have predicted. We knew the ad would loop on repeat, so the start and end had to join cleanly, and on the first recce, we noticed the lights flickered and came up in a sequence when first switched on. We built that real flicker into the entrance and exit shots, so the room appears to come alive each time the ad runs. And while we had poses planned, the unscripted ones the cast fell into naturally were the ones that made the final cut, because they felt real.
The ad ran across The O2 until Virgin Media Gamepad finally opened, turning a hidden ground-floor room into a stop on people’s night out.
What it shows: creative leadership under real constraints – building a single, clear idea that does several jobs in ten seconds, and getting a high-energy result out of a tight budget and a difficult space through in-camera craft and quick thinking on the day.