How do we activate your brand?
Brand Activation Events in Melbourne
Through memorable live experiences. We design and build immersive, escape-room-style games centred on your brand values, products and campaign, so your audience does not just watch your message, they play it.
What we make
We build bespoke, interactive experiences that put people inside your brand. Think a custom live game, similar to an escape room, built around your product, your story and your marketing strategy, designed and engineered by the same team behind 16 rooms across Melbourne. The one question we start with: can you truly engage with people?
Activation partners
Let’s build something
Tell us about your brand, your audience and what you want them to walk away with, and we will design the experience around it. Email enquiries@rushescapegame.com.au.
The problem with most activations is that nothing is at stake
A stand, a screen and a giveaway all ask the same thing of a person walking past, which is a few seconds of attention in exchange for something free. They work, in the narrow sense that people stop. What they rarely produce is anyone who could tell you afterwards what the brand actually said.
A playable experience asks for something different. It asks the visitor to want something, work for it and either get it or not, and it puts your material inside the thing they have to solve rather than on a banner beside it. Attention stops being the thing you are buying and becomes a by-product of the thing they are doing.
That is the whole basis of what we build for clients. It is also the reason our work tends to be measured in dwell time and completion rather than in foot traffic.
What we actually build
Four broad shapes, and most projects are one of them or a hybrid.
A playable install on your site
Campus, office, foyer, retail floorA purpose-built game, delivered and installed where your audience already is. This is the format when the audience cannot be moved and the activation has to come to them.
A transportable build
Events, roadshows, multiple sitesDesigned from the start to be packed, moved and reassembled, so a single build serves a run of dates or several campuses rather than one afternoon.
A branded takeover of an existing room
At one of our four venuesThe fastest route to something playable, because the set, the technology and the staffing already exist. Suited to a campaign that needs an experience quickly rather than an object it keeps.
A permanent or semi-permanent asset
Kept and reusedBuilt to run for years rather than a week, with the maintenance and content refresh handled afterwards. This is where the economics change, because the cost is spread across every intake rather than one activation window.
The work we can talk about
Client work is usually confidential. These three are not, and between them they cover the range: a hotel, a university campus, and a university library.
Crowne Plaza Melbourne, 2017
We built a playable game into a KingSuite. Not a room beside the hotel or something the concierge sent guests to, but a working escape experience installed inside the accommodation, solvable at any point during a stay.
Hotel Management covered it and called it an Australian first for a hotel, in a story that ran under the magazine's editor in chief in May 2017 with the hotel's general manager and ours both on the record. It is the piece of our commissioned work carrying independent press rather than a case study we wrote about ourselves. Read it here: Crowne Plaza Melbourne's Australian first.
The brief was an original story written for the hotel, a 45 minute solve, running as an overnight package across winter 2017. Every constraint pushed against the way an escape room is normally built. A hotel cannot pause trading for an install, the set has to leave the suite fully functional as a bedroom, and nothing can require a staff member standing beside it.
Monash University, two engagements
The first came through Y&R ANZ as an Open Day activation, built so prospective students discovered the university by playing rather than being walked around it. Agency-led, to an agency brief, on a date that could not move.
The second was larger and is the more useful reference: three purpose-built rooms delivered in shipping containers. Detention, the Exam Room and the Dean's Office. Containers are their own discipline, because the build has to be sound in transit, work as a sealed playable space on arrival, and survive being moved again afterwards. This is the format to ask about when something needs to visit several sites rather than live in one.
La Trobe University Library
The one with academic verification behind it. A library activation built so students discovered services they would otherwise never have found, subsequently written up in a peer-reviewed conference paper for the Australian Library and Information Association.
Very little experiential work of any kind ends up documented in academic literature. If a procurement team wants evidence rather than a portfolio, that is the piece to send them.
Why the build team matters more than the concept
Concepts are cheap and every agency in Melbourne can produce one. The failure point in experiential work is almost always the gap between the deck and the thing that has to exist, function and survive contact with eight hundred people in a day.
We have been designing and building escape rooms in house since 2014, sixteen of them across four Melbourne venues, with no kits, no licensed designs and no external fabrication. The same team does the design, the set construction, the electronics and the control systems, and then operates the result commercially every day of the week under real public load.
That last part is the unusual bit. Most experiential builders hand over and leave. We run our own builds as live commercial products, which means we know exactly which mechanisms fail, which instructions get misread, and which puzzle a tired group at four in the afternoon simply will not attempt. That knowledge is very hard to acquire any other way, and it is what stops an activation from being beautiful and unplayable.
How a project runs
- Brief. The audience, the single thing they should walk away with, the footprint, the dates and whether it has to travel.
- Concept. A treatment covering the premise, the flow, how long a participant is engaged, and what your material is doing inside it rather than around it.
- Design and build. Set, props, electronics and control systems, produced in our own workshop.
- Testing. Run with real people before it meets your audience, because the first twenty participants always find something no designer predicted.
- Install and run. Delivery, installation, and staffing on the day if you want it staffed by people who have run games commercially.
- Afterwards. Pack down and store, redeploy to the next site, or keep it running with content refreshed periodically.
What we need in order to quote
Five things, and with them a realistic number can usually come back quickly.
Who the audience is and roughly how many of them. How long you want each person engaged, because two minutes and twenty minutes are entirely different builds. Where it happens and how much floor space there is. How long it needs to live, from a single day to permanently. Whether it travels, because that decides the construction method before anything else does.
Send those to enquiries@rushescapegame.com.au. Rough answers are fine. We would rather scope it properly with you than quote against a guess.
Questions from agencies and marketing teams
Do you work through agencies or direct?
Both. We have delivered to an agency brief with the agency owning the client relationship, and we have worked directly with the organisation. Neither is unusual for us.
How long does one take to build?
It depends entirely on scale and whether it travels, so any number quoted before the brief exists would be invented. Tell us the date you are working back from and we will tell you honestly whether it is achievable.
Can it be measured?
Yes, and better than most formats. Participation, completion, time spent and where people got stuck are all observable, because the experience is a process rather than a moment.
We want something at one of your venues instead.
That is the quickest option and it costs less, because the infrastructure exists. For a straightforward corporate session rather than a branded build, team building is the page you want.
Is this the same as hiring an escape room?
No. Hiring means your group plays something we already made. An activation means we design and build something that did not exist, around your brief.
The problem with most activations is that nothing is at stake
A stand, a screen and a giveaway all ask the same thing of a person walking past, which is a few seconds of attention in exchange for something free. They work, in the narrow sense that people stop. What they rarely produce is anyone who could tell you afterwards what the brand actually said.
A playable experience asks for something different. It asks the visitor to want something, work for it and either get it or not, and it puts your material inside the thing they have to solve rather than on a banner beside it. Attention stops being the thing you are buying and becomes a by-product of the thing they are doing.
That is the whole basis of what we build for clients. It is also the reason our work tends to be measured in dwell time and completion rather than in foot traffic.
What we actually build
Four broad shapes, and most projects are one of them or a hybrid.
A playable install on your site
Campus, office, foyer, retail floorA purpose-built game, delivered and installed where your audience already is. This is the format when the audience cannot be moved and the activation has to come to them.
A transportable build
Events, roadshows, multiple sitesDesigned from the start to be packed, moved and reassembled, so a single build serves a run of dates or several campuses rather than one afternoon.
A branded takeover of an existing room
At one of our four venuesThe fastest route to something playable, because the set, the technology and the staffing already exist. Suited to a campaign that needs an experience quickly rather than an object it keeps.
A permanent or semi-permanent asset
Kept and reusedBuilt to run for years rather than a week, with the maintenance and content refresh handled afterwards. This is where the economics change, because the cost is spread across every intake rather than one activation window.
The three we can talk about
Client work is usually confidential. These three are not, and they cover the range.
La Trobe University Library is the one with independent verification behind it. A library activation built to teach students how to use services they would otherwise never discover, and it was subsequently written up in a peer-reviewed conference paper for the Australian Library and Information Association. Very little experiential work of any kind gets independently documented in academic literature, and it is the piece we would point a sceptical procurement team at first.
Monash University came through Y&R ANZ as an Open Day activation, built so prospective students discovered the university by playing rather than by being walked around it. Agency-led, delivered to an agency brief, on a fixed date that could not move.
Crowne Plaza was a winter activation built into the guest experience rather than run alongside it, which is a harder problem than it sounds, because a hotel cannot pause its operation for your installation.
Why the build team matters more than the concept
Concepts are cheap and every agency in Melbourne can produce one. The failure point in experiential work is almost always the gap between the deck and the thing that has to exist, function and survive contact with eight hundred people in a day.
We have been designing and building escape rooms in house since 2014, sixteen of them across four Melbourne venues, with no kits, no licensed designs and no external fabrication. The same team does the design, the set construction, the electronics and the control systems, and then operates the result commercially every day of the week under real public load.
That last part is the unusual bit. Most experiential builders hand over and leave. We run our own builds as live commercial products, which means we know exactly which mechanisms fail, which instructions get misread, and which puzzle a tired group at four in the afternoon simply will not attempt. That knowledge is very hard to acquire any other way, and it is what stops an activation from being beautiful and unplayable.
How a project runs
- Brief. The audience, the single thing they should walk away with, the footprint, the dates and whether it has to travel.
- Concept. A treatment covering the premise, the flow, how long a participant is engaged, and what your material is doing inside it rather than around it.
- Design and build. Set, props, electronics and control systems, produced in our own workshop.
- Testing. Run with real people before it meets your audience, because the first twenty participants always find something no designer predicted.
- Install and run. Delivery, installation, and staffing on the day if you want it staffed by people who have run games commercially.
- Afterwards. Pack down and store, redeploy to the next site, or keep it running with content refreshed periodically.
What we need in order to quote
Five things, and with them a realistic number can usually come back quickly.
Who the audience is and roughly how many of them. How long you want each person engaged, because two minutes and twenty minutes are entirely different builds. Where it happens and how much floor space there is. How long it needs to live, from a single day to permanently. Whether it travels, because that decides the construction method before anything else does.
Send those to enquiries@rushescapegame.com.au. Rough answers are fine. We would rather scope it properly with you than quote against a guess.
Questions from agencies and marketing teams
Do you work through agencies or direct?
Both. We have delivered to an agency brief with the agency owning the client relationship, and we have worked directly with the organisation. Neither is unusual for us.
How long does one take to build?
It depends entirely on scale and whether it travels, so any number quoted before the brief exists would be invented. Tell us the date you are working back from and we will tell you honestly whether it is achievable.
Can it be measured?
Yes, and better than most formats. Participation, completion, time spent and where people got stuck are all observable, because the experience is a process rather than a moment.
We want something at one of your venues instead.
That is the quickest option and it costs less, because the infrastructure exists. For a straightforward corporate session rather than a branded build, team building is the page you want.
Is this the same as hiring an escape room?
No. Hiring means your group plays something we already made. An activation means we design and build something that did not exist, around your brief.
ACTIVATION PARTNERS
Y&R ANZ AND MONASH UNIVERSITY OPEN DAY ACTIVATION HELPED NEW STUDENTS DISCOVER MONASH UNIVERSITY
CROWNE PLAZA WINTER ACTIVATION AMPLIFIED THE ACCOMMODATION EXPERIENCE
LA TROBE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ACTIVATION HELPED STUDENTS LEARN ABOUT KEY LIBRARY SERVICES