The Race to Olympia

Kensington Olympia has long carried an unfair reputation: a world-class events and commercial destination that people assumed was awkward to reach. With the upgraded Mildmay line and far more frequent trains stopping right beside the building, that story changed overnight — and Olympia needed a way to tell it that nobody would scroll past.

The brief

Working with Want Marketing, Olympia came to us with a positioning challenge dressed up as a good-news story. The estate was now genuinely well connected — but "we have more trains now" is not a message that travels on LinkedIn. The job was to reframe perceptions of Olympia's connectivity for the people who matter most to a commercial estate: the agents, occupiers and companies weighing up where to put their offices. And it had to be social-first — fun, fast and shareable, not a corporate explainer.

The idea

A commuter race. Four leading property agents, four different starting points, four modes of transport — all converging on Kensington Olympia to see who could get there fastest. We turned an abstract benefit ("better connected") into something with stakes, personalities and a finish line.

• Hunter Booth Savills Piccadilly Circus, by Tube
• Marianne Thomas Cushman & Wakefield Paddington, by bike
• Luke Hacking CBRE Bond Street, by Tube
• Richard Howard CBRE Clapham Junction, by Overground

To keep the energy up, we put a handheld mic in their hands and had them answer questions about their morning commute as they travelled. Some of the stories were genuinely funny, and that off-the-cuff humour became the glue holding the b-roll together.

The production

A race is the hardest kind of shoot to control, because the thing that makes it compelling — momentum — is also the thing that gives you no second takes. We filmed on the move, in public, weaving on and off live transport with members of the public all around us. Every shot had to be grabbed first time, with the crew staying completely fluid: anticipating the next platform, the next staircase, the next gap in the crowd.

The standout sequence was Marianne's bike leg. We mounted a DJI Action camera to her bike basket for a continuous, characterful POV while she talked to camera, and Mike rode alongside filming bike-to-bike on a Lumix S5II through London traffic. It's a deceptively difficult thing to do well — and it's the shot people remembered.

The films

We delivered a six-film series, all shot in landscape:

• A 40-second teaser trailer to launch the campaign and tee up the race
• Four individual agent films (around five minutes each), following each journey
• One final film bringing all four routes together for the reveal

With a timer running on screen and the four routes intercut, the series built to its payoff: Richard Howard crossing the line first. The race was, of course, a piece of storytelling — a produced format built to entertain and make a point, and it landed exactly as intended.

The results

The campaign ran on Olympia London's LinkedIn and was picked up well beyond it. The agents reposted across their own profiles, and the films were shared by their firms' company pages — including CBRE — extending reach into exactly the professional audiences Olympia wanted to influence. Across the series, the films generated well over 1,000 likes and dozens of reposts, driving a noticeable lift in traffic and a real sense of buzz around the estate.

More importantly, it did the strategic job: it replaced a tired "hard to reach" perception with something current, energetic and memorable — in a format property professionals actually wanted to watch and share.

"This was the kind of shoot where the fun and the chaos turn up at exactly the same moment. No time for retakes, no controlled environment — just four agents, a city full of commuters, and a finish line. The first Lime bike we grabbed had the assistance of a shopping trolley; I spent the first half heaving a dead e-bike up the road, legs on fire, trying to keep Marianne perfectly framed — before I twigged. The save was the basket. That little DJI cam did some of the best work of the day."

Credits

Client

Olympia London

Agency

Want Marketing — Rachelle Munsie

Producer, Director & Cinematographer

Mike Wilde

Second Operator

Jane Wilde

Editor

Euan Wilson-Baig

Production

GuestHouse Media