Stockland Martel

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We’re always hearing about how Twitter and Facebook and the like are being leveraged for marketing purposes, but Google Maps? I hadn’t seen that trusty navigational resource identified it as a promotional tool until today, when I read a story at Creative Review‘s website about Sony’s promo for In This Light and On This Evening, the new album from British indie-rock band Editors. The concept for the unusual online promo was to allow fans to visit, via a hacked version of Google Maps, the London streets that inspired the various songs on the record. The promo also includes panoramic photos of the band.

“The images feature the band and a group of their fans performing surreal activities which have cryptic meanings relating to the songs,” Phil Clandillon, creative director at Sony Music, tells Creative Review. “The locations are normally unavailable on the regular Street View. Our modified version of Google Maps allows users to enter into these locations and make the transition from light to dark so fans can explore the band’s atmospheric vision of London at night.”

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The promo starts here, and you can click around—as you would with the real Google Maps street view—to find your way. In this case, to tracks from the Editors' new CD.

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The photographer for the project was James Royall, who shot the panoramas using a 180-degree fisheye lens, stitching together the parts using software. (The story doesn’t indicate which program, but I recall that the Israeli photographer Yuval Yairi used Photoshop for his painstakingly constructed panoramas, which consisted of thousands of images that he shot with a Sony DSR-PD150 video camera set to “still” mode. I wrote about his process for the November 2008 issue of PDN, and Yuval has posted the story here.)

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One of James Royall's stitched-together panoramas.

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You can read Creative Review‘s behind-the-scenes story here. To check out the promo, visit Editors’ website. Oh, yeah, and the album? It’s good. Dark in that arty ’80s way, melodic, not too ironic. It already came out in the U.K. It comes out on this side of the pond on October 27 January 19 on the FADER label.

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