Nokia Lumia Launch in London, Featuring Deadmau5

Monday 28^th November 2011 saw the much anticipated Nokia Lumia launch event at Southbank in London. Having heard the hype I had to go! My friends and I headed down to Southbank at around 7pm and the bank was already starting to bustle; half an hour prior to kick off the whole place was absolutely buzzing - a real carnival atmosphere had spread either side of the river, with the place lit up with a mix of police cherry lights, Christmas decorations and fluorescent green mouse ears in honour of Deadmau5, (pronounced Deadmouse) the main DJ playing.

Music was really key to this launch event and Nokia had used their most famous song, “Garden”, in their ad campaign for the Lumia release already. The band kicking the event off, TEET (Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs - who I’ve seen live before) were amazing, and despite the name which gets difficult to say after a few glasses of mulled wine played a 15 minute set which went down really well with the audience.

The main act everyone was waiting for was Deadmau5, and when he hit the stage at 9.15pm, Southbank erupted! He only played a 15 minute set, which was a bit disappointing, but the most unique part of the event was the augmented reality which was projected onto the Millbank tower.

The most impressive graphics came at the end of the set, when they played a 4D Projection show, all climaxing to showing the new Lumia phone. There were a few muffled boos when the phone was shown so obviously, as the audience demographic (like me) were 20-25 year olds, whom I suspect objected to the explicit advertising; though from working in a marketing department I imagine that the whole aim of the graphic spectacle was to showcase the phone.

Though this experience poses the question – if you launch a product how do you showcase it without turning the crowd off? After all, the whole event was about Nokia? Did the crowd have the right to protest when such blatant showcasing was present, or were they just ungrateful?

The overall feeling after the event seemed overwhelmingly positive, with people’s only grievance being that they wanted more; which is often how everyone wants to leave an audience.

Watch the video we took of the closing projection. Nokia really have made a great effort of putting themselves back on the mobile map… we’ll just have to wait and see now if this piece of hardware really takes off.

Great launch event Nokia! I can’t wait to check out the phone!

Rory