The recent LSO campaign has been created to authentically and powerfully capture the power of the LSO’s performances, and the emotional impact this has on the audience. As one of the world’s leading symphony orchestras, the digital craft and art direction of the campaign needs to be of the highest standard to reflect their music mastery.

Equally important is the combination of biometric data and digital artistry, which fundamental to the creative interpretation of an audience member’s emotional journey, as they listen to a piece performed by the LSO.

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In 2017, LSO launched an identity to reflect its forward-thinking spirit and appeal to a new generation of audience. The identity placed Sir Simon Rattle at the heart of the brand, using motion capture technology. The conductor’s movements shaped a bold visual expression that captured the dynamism of their performances.

Since then, the LSO’s annual new season campaigns have reinterpreted the conductors motion data, to create unique campaigns for each season’s theme.

In 2024, LSO enters an exciting new phase, embarking on their next chapter with newly appointed Chief Conductor, Sir Antonio Pappano. To reflect this pivotal moment, LSO took the opportunity to evolve the brand story and shift the focus away from a single figure – the conductor – to the collective mastery of the musicians to create emotionally powerful performances that promise to move its audience. This new focus was captured in our creative idea: Emotional Journeys.

Our idea, Emotional Journeys, celebrates the individual journeys that audiences go on, the product of a conductor and an orchestra transporting them to new places. An ode to human emotions experienced during musical escapades.

So, for the new season’s film and campaign, we set out to capture and reflect an audience member’s emotional journey.

We collaborated with the Univeristy College London’s Ear Institute, and using EEG technology, we captured the reactions of an audience member as they listened to the LSO’s performance of ‘Jupiter’ from Gustav Holst’s, ‘The Planets’, featured in this year’s season. With 64 sensors tracking their brain activity and additional sensors monitoring heart rate and skin conductance, we were able to capture their experience.

Working with digital artists, we combined the biometric data with digital artistry to create an evocative and mesmerising film.

The film and selected stills were used to inform the digital and print campaign.

We used Holst’s ‘The Planets’ to inspire our creative expression, blending abstract and tangible elements of the human brain and the planet Jupiter, to create an emotional journey through space and sound.

Our journey starts as the music begins; electric neurons in the brain fire-off in response, and we see dust particles start to swirl and gather. Neural-like rivers begin to illuminate in the darkness as they flow into twisting landscapes, shaping the evolving world around us. As the atmosphere of the music builds, dramatic vaporous storms swirl on the surface and react to the impact of the music’s intensity. And, finally, we offer the viewer a moment of realisation - as the camera pulls out we are transported through a vast cerebral landscape. As we continue to pull back, we reach our crescendo moment and see Jupiter; through the vapour and clouds are flashes of electricity (brain activity).