SIGNAL Festival Prague:
An airline at a festival that bans advertising.
Emirates at SIGNAL 2019
Context
A sponsor slot at Prague's biggest cultural event.
Emirates was a sponsor of SIGNAL 2019, the Czech Republic's largest cultural event: four nights of light installations and digital art across the historic centre of Prague. On our side it was a two-person job, one account director and me. I wrote the concept and the brief, and stayed on the project as art director and brand reviewer until it ran.
The Problem
No logos, no claims, no ads.
SIGNAL has one rule for its sponsors: no conventional advertising between the artworks. A logo on a wall would have been turned down, and rightly so. Whatever Emirates put on a facade had to hold its own next to the installations, as something people would stop for anyway.
The Approach
Show the network, not the brand.
Show the network instead of the brand. Every destination relevant to the Czech market gets its own visual world, built from its cultural motifs and symbols, and the worlds connect into one continuous journey rather than a run of hard cuts. It opens on an Emirates A380 taking off, livery unmistakable, and travels from Prague via Dubai to Sydney, Thailand and Bali before landing in the Maldives. A rainbow colourway, one hue per destination, kept it joyful rather than corporate.
The Work
Five destinations, one continuous journey.
I laid out the keyframes: which motifs, in which order, how one destination hands over to the next. They set the rainbow colourway, the icons for each destination and full-screen wipes as the first transitions. That was the brief that went to illo, a motion studio from Turin and a regular SIGNAL collaborator.
illo brought it to life with character-led animation: playful, culturally specific, rich. They proposed a spinning-circle transition that loosened the colour logic and gave the piece more momentum. The festival first rejected the typographic destination messaging and the closing line as too commercial. We argued for a more restrained treatment, and they approved it.
My job from there was art direction and brand review: keeping the work true to the Emirates visual language while giving illo the room the festival demanded.
The Result
500,000 visitors, and a bigger brief for 2020.
The piece ran every evening of the festival on the facade of an Art Nouveau school at Lyčkovo Square. SIGNAL 2019 drew more than 500,000 visitors across its venues, and in its first year as a partner, Emirates placed third in visitor recall and brand preference.
It moved efficiently, handled the festival's concerns without friction and left both client and festival happy. For 2020, Emirates was lined up as the festival's main sponsor, and I developed a much larger installation concept for it. It didn't happen: COVID cancelled SIGNAL 2020.
