Race of Drones Oulu

Known as the tech­nol­o­gy city of Fin­land, Oulu also wants to be an inter­na­tion­al city of events – the Euro­pean Cap­i­tal of Cul­ture 2026. Race of Drones Oulu attract­ed 40 inter­na­tion­al drone pilots to com­pete in an excit­ing world cup that was open to audi­ence.

START­ING POINT

The strate­gic focus points of the City of Oulu are:

1. A vibrant Oulu is grow­ing and becom­ing more inter­na­tion­al
2. Attrac­tive Oulu – a city of North­ern nature and cul­ture
3. Grip­ping Oulu – a city of smiles and high lev­el of exper­tise

To sup­port these focus points we want­ed to organ­ise an inter­na­tion­al event with one of the fastest grow­ing sports of the world – drone rac­ing.

We want­ed to rein­force Oulu’s pro­fil­ing as a fore­run­ner of eSports and drone fly­ing. We also want­ed to strength­en Oulu’s rep­u­ta­tion as a city of tech­nol­o­gy.

Chal­lenge

The event need­ed its look. And it need­ed its cause. How do you visu­al­ly com­mu­ni­cate the excite­ment and the ener­gy of a drone race? How to attract audi­ence new to the sports and encour­age inter­na­tion­al rac­ers to par­tic­i­pate? How to make sure it’s an excit­ing event for all?

solu­tion

The name of the event – Race of Drones Oulu – is inter­na­tion­al, sonorous and eas­i­ly mem­o­rable. The visu­al iden­ti­ty formed to be styl­ish and sim­ple but also dis­tinct. The visu­al­i­ty exudes future, fast colours of lights, speed and mod­ern shapes.

Based on these guide­lines, we built a web­site, which was the main source of infor­ma­tion of the event. We inden­ti­fied the main tar­get group to be between the ages 13 and 25, and there­fore the mar­ket­ing efforts were focused on social media through­out the project– Insta­gram, YouTube and Face­book.

An impres­sive race track was built in Oulu Hall where, thanks to mag­nif­i­cent light­ing, the visu­al­i­ty of the track was pow­er­ful.

End result

Con­tes­tant spots of Race of Drones Oulu were quick­ly filled with 40 inter­na­tion­al drone pilots. Con­tes­tants from eight dif­fer­ent coun­tries gath­ered to Oulu Hall. An audi­ence of 1,400 peo­ple arrived to wit­ness excit­ing com­pe­ti­tion. The com­pe­ti­tion had a good media cov­er­age – Iltasanomat, Kale­va, Oul­ule­hti, Radio Poo­ki and Finnish broad­cast­ing Com­pa­ny YLE all report­ed about the event.

Sole­ly the online news of Kale­va, Iltasanomat, MSN and Radio Poo­ki reached 1,861,665 peo­ple. Also only with Face­book adver­tis­ing 82,024 peo­ple were reached, which is almost the half of the peo­ple of Oulu. The event page had 4,906 views and aver­age time spent on the page was over 4 min­utes.

Role of työ­maa

• event con­cept and name design
• visu­al and graph­ic design
• web page design
• com­mu­ni­ca­tions
• mar­ket­ing – social media, google ads, YouTube
• PR
• mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als – caps, fly­ers, shirts, screen mate­ri­als and large for­mat prints for the event
• event plan­ning
• report­ing