Helsinki Synth City Festival is an annual music event. The festival is organised by the Helsinki Synth City artist collective, a group of independent, uncompromising, and like-minded artists.
In 2019, the very first Helsinki Synth City Festival took place in Ääniwalli, Helsinki. The organisers wanted to bring a new wing to the marketing, so an AR-enhanced ticket competition was arranged.
| Client | Helsinki Synth City Festival |
| AR Production | Arilyn |
Helsinki Synth City Festival embraces the new coming of synthwave: a genre inspired by the 80's pop culture. In synthwave, there are no limits when it comes to music. Synthwave can be anything between black metal and laid-back reviere. Or something else around that.
With an industry this intriguing, it was only natural to add to the marketing campaign something out there: an AR-enhanced competition combining the physical and the virtual worlds.
The AR experience sent the audience on a hunt to find event posters and stickers around Helsinki in the competition. By scanning the advertisement with the Arilyn app, cyberpunk AR content popped up on the user's smartphone. The user could now go to buy tickets to the event or record their AR experience and post it to social media. By posting the experience, the user would participate in the competition to win tickets to the event.
"With Arilyn, Helsinki Synth City was able to make the cyberpunk aspect come alive. We all love Blade Runner and how in that classic movie, advertisements have been turned into augmented reality. We wanted to be different and take the promotion of our synthwave festival to the future. With Arilyn, it was super easy, and we could do it all in-house, as the Arilyn Manager is extremely easy to use.
- Juha "Millennium" Falck / Helsinki Synth City / Neo Helsinki Oy
Our AR poster gathered a lot of interest from all around the world, as the synthwave scene is very global. We also wanted to have this gamification element where we promoted the usage of Arilyn for people in Helsinki to get a free ticket to our festival. There was a direct link to the ticket store also from the poster and no need for QR-codes, etc., as we had a button appear in AR to the poster.
Our experience with Arilyn has been super positive, and we feel our cyberpunk journey will continue to new heights during the next events."
For future synthwave events, check the Neo Helsinki website and Helsinki Synth City's social media: