Historic London

Using Google’s Street View functionality, we superimposed 100-year-old photographs over current views to create Historic London for Expedia UK.

Objectives

1. Achieve top-tier, authoritative, editorially valid links that increase site authority.
2. Deliver LinkScore results of over 1,000 points.
3. Support and increase brand recognition efforts through coverage, social and print.

Methodology

Our plan was to create a simple, engaging gallery featuring historic images of key places and tourist hotspots in London. By superimposing 100-year-old photos over Google Street View scenes, we enabled users to interactively browse the bustling streets of London and see how some of the most famous parts of England’s capital looked a century ago.

We curated high-quality images of famous landmarks and destinations in London and ensured that the images were appropriately framed to match the current view as seen on Google Street View. This was a significant challenge as it was important to ensure position, angles and scale matched Street View to give the user the best experience.

We worked on a kick-ass outreach strategy to create some ‘buzz’ around the campaign in advance of the launch which resulted in a surge of links.

Results

• An innovative and unique campaign allowing users to view familiar surroundings with a completely new perspective
• A LinkScore of 7,764 points
• 79 linking root domains from some of the biggest authority sites including; Business Insider, Time Out, Independent, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, The Sun, ITV, and BT
• Over 164,000 campaign views
• Offline coverage in The Sun and The Scotsman
• Over 90k social media shares including from some major accounts
• ITV London news also covered the campaign in a segment during their evening news broadcast

Coverage highlights

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• https://www.businessinsider.com/interactive-map-of-london-in-the-past-expedia-2016-3?r=US&IR=T