Consumer PR case study: Making sure Escape Reality didn’t get lost in the wave of Edinburgh escape room noise
WITH escape rooms in Dubai and Las Vegas, to name but a few, Escape Reality launched a new venture in Edinburgh last October and needed to hit it with a PR bang.
Tapping into my plethora of media contacts, the first PR skill that I had to utilise was setting up a launch event. Escape Reality opening up an Edinburgh branch was a massive coup for the capital and I had to make sure that everyone knew about it. Tapping into my local journalists black-book and reaching out to influential digital bloggers ensured that news spread fast.
The next stage was to keep the PR momentum going. I did that by acting as a press office between Escape Reality and local newsdesks, relaying information to them about new offers and media-worthy news. Alongside this I opened up communication threads with local businesses and further afield bloggers to attend Escape Reality and take on an escape room. Achieving both traditional and digital PR success, as well as ticking off the one of the most useful PR techniques of all – word of mouth.
Consumer PR: Escape Reality
Showcasing my creativity, I devised a plan and overall strategy for a new Escape Reality campaign: Mazeophobia (The fear of being lost).
The new and under-researched medical term is still to be medically accepted by scholars, but treatments do exist for the phobia. Namely, a process of systematic desensitisation. The perfect platform for a create PR campaign.
After developing the strategy, collecting the survey answers and sourcing suitable participants to take part in the mazeophobia campaign, I then continued by helping organise the event and collect quotes for the media.
The campaign was a success on multiple fronts. I managed media coverage in several publications, due to the drip-feed PR technique, and, most importantly, the participants felt that attending the mazeophobia event helped deal with their fear of being lost. Fantastic news.
Over the course of the relationship between myself and Escape Reality we managed an overall OTS of over a million. This included a string of crucial coverage in the local press, as well as one feature length article in one of Scotland’s most read publications, The Scottish Sun.