Virgin Media Gamepad
Client
Virgin Media
Industry
Telco
Category
DOOH, video production
Leading creative is rarely just about the idea. It is about getting a room of clients to believe in it, then protecting it all the way to the final frame. This project was as much about the second part as the first.
Virgin Media Gamepad is the brand’s dedicated gaming space at The O2 in London, opened in July 2023, with industry-leading tech and consoles and hundreds of games, free and open to Virgin Media and O2 customers and the public alike. The brief was to raise awareness of it among the thousands of people already moving through The O2: a welcome video to play in the Gamepad lobby as gamers queued and digital out-of-home creative for the venue’s screens.
As creative lead, I started with the question the audience was actually asking. A lot of people did not know what Gamepad was or that they could walk straight in for free. So the work had one job: answer “what is this, and how do I get in” quickly, on a screen, in passing. The idea I landed on took a line straight from the brand toolkit, ‘Free and open to all’, and made it literal. We cast a diverse group of real gamers and made them the heroes of the big screens, so the work said not only that Gamepad was for everyone, but that gaming was too.
Selling that through took as much craft as making it. I presented the thinking to the client, ran tissue sessions to find the treatment they wanted and built the ideas out with the visual references that made them click, which the brand team loved. DOOH was less familiar territory for them, so part of my job was education: what the format does well and where it earns attention, and why the creative needed to work the way I was proposing. Through several rounds of feedback and a long post-production process, I kept the client and brand teams close, so the finished work landed somewhere everyone believed in.
The welcome video was storyboarded as a whistle-stop tour of the whole space, built to excite gamers while they waited to get in. Most of the energy lives in the edit, so I planned a shot list that could carry it: crash zooms, quick cuts, speed ramps and whip pans, a cadence that never sits still. Because the screens run without sound, we layered tracked motion graphics over the footage, calling out the kit and zones like a game interface, which underlined the gaming credentials and let the piece work silently.
The DOOH was designed into the same shoot to keep the budget tight, with every asset drawn from a single day of filming: gamers shot down the lens and handheld across the site, cut fast to match the welcome video. Five screen sizes in all.
The clients loved the finished work, and it is still running at The O2 today. The welcome video was picked up for a screen at Virgin Media’s new Paddington headquarters too. In its first twelve months, 89,265 people visited Gamepad, an average of 244 a day. I would love to claim the screens delivered all of that, but awareness was the ask, and for the crowds passing through The O2, this is the work that told them what was waiting for them inside.
What the project delivered:
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A welcome video and a DOOH suite across five screen sizes, all from a single shoot day
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A clear answer to the customer’s real question, what Gamepad is and how to access it, on screens - throughout The O2
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Work still live at The O2 today, and has been extended to Virgin Media’s new Paddington HQ
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A first-year audience of 89,265 visitors to the space, around 244 a day
What it shows: creative leadership from idea to delivery – generating the concept, then selling it through tissue sessions and client education before producing assets efficiently from a single shoot.
