The last few years have been a very exciting time for street artists working in the UK. After the rise of Banksy, it’s clear that there has been an increasing acceptance of street art and graffiti by the public and brands. Whilst making street art and graffiti is still often illegal, the number of opportunities artists have to make a living legally has increased dramatically. Even on the streets themselves, there has been an increasing number of opportunities for artists to paint legally thanks to a rise in an increasing number of artists who ask permission and organisatons that ask on behalf of artists.
That’s how our organization organisation started to work so directly with artists! As a photographer, I helped to build the largest online street art and photo archive at www.globalstreetart.com. In 2012, though we had a change of focus and started finding new walls for artists to paint legally. The speed at which we’ve moved has surprised even me, . We’ve having supported the production of over 300 legal street art murals in London since our humble beginnings, for instancethen, even painting murals on the Southbank Centre, – a grade 1 listed building – , as part of an their Urban Arts festival earlier this year.
It seems that artists want to paint and London wants to be painted! Working directly with so many national and international artists has given us a great network, which we now give our clients access to. We’ve painted everything from bedrooms to large outdoor commercial murals for some of the World’s world’s largest brands. Our recent mural for Nokia was well-received by Microsoft (who own Nokia), the public and our huge online fan base.
Murals have distinct advantages over billboards and it doesn’t matter if they’re painted indoors or outdoors! As well as making a great mural, which enriches your foyer, rooms or your street presence, murals produce great digital content that can amplify your social media conversation.
We were recently asked by Nido, who own London’s tallest student accommodation building in Shoreditch, to paint one mural in their foyer and another in their courtyard. We used our extensive artist database to find the right artists and we moved from first contact to design and execution in only 10 days. The video and photos that were also produced were shared hundreds of times on Facebook.
We’re acutely aware of the importance of social media, which is why we have focused some of our resource on building up such a large fanbase, with over 120,000 highly engaged followers on social media. Not only can we paint something amazing that fits your brand, we can also tell everyone that we did it!
Our industry has moved very fast – this summer we went one step further and produced the first augmented reality street art mural in the UK, integrating with the technology Blippar. The client, EasyJet, used a photograph of our mural as the magazine cover for their August in-flight Traveler magazine. Both the magazine cover and the mural itself could be used to trigger the augmented reality feature, through an iPhone app, which then played a time lapse of the mural being painted. It was so special even Marketing Week reported on the mural!
The changing tastes of consumers and the advent of social media and other technologies has made our industry a great place to be. There’s nothing else we’d rather be doing!
