Click to view: http://omnianightclub.com
The iconic Omnia at Caesars Palace Las Vegas is the brainchild of ultra-premium lifestyle marque Hakkasan Group. Founded in London in 2001, Hakkasan operates entertainment and hospitality venues around the world, among them the namesake Hakkasan at the MGM Grand, the Searsucker social dining brand and luxe daylife destinations Wet Republic and HQ Beach Club.
Omnia was envisioned as nothing less than a new nightlife flagship for a global audience. Hakkasan sought out collaborators in the world of dance music, tour production and entertainment marketing to help realize this goal. EDM legend Calvin Harris was engaged as brand ambassador. The Rockwell Group and U2’s production designer Willie Williams were assigned to craft the club’s interior and lighting. AvatarLabs was entrusted as caretaker of the Omnia brand in the digital space.
Hakkasan approached Avatar due to our deep knowledge of movie marketing, where digital promotions need to bow big and speak volumes with limited content. Our challenge: translate Omnia’s provocative spirit and uncommon customer pledge to online, mobile and social while the club was still under construction, and no imagery of the 75,000 square-foot venue was available.
Most nightlife venues lean heavily on DJs to drive ticketing. Omnia distinguishes itself as brand-first, cultivating an identity inspired by—but not limited to—its world-class roster of artists. Omnia entices, never broadcasts. It envelops rather than excludes. Omnia luxury is simultaneously intimate and extravagant, never arrogant. Guided by these brand pillars, AvatarLabs developed a comprehensive design and user-interface strategy—and the creative with which to execute it—virtually from scratch, delivering a targeted blend of high-impact visuals and unhesitating luxury.
UX and design teams coordinated with the Omnia marketing group during the venue build, drawing inspiration from the club’s interior appointments, colors, and lighting design. This yielded a sumptuous, textural palette of royal plum, purple, velvet and wine, instantly elevating the website above the familiar nightclub uniform of black and gold.
Months before the club’s spaceship-like chandelier was revealed—a 22,000-pound, computer-actuated array of crystal, lighting, and LED video surfaces constructed in eight dance-floor-spanning concentric rings—it inspired a centerpiece landing page. A cloud of “digital gems” shimmer and spin behind a geometric content cluster that changes shape in response to mouse movement. The Omnia logotype always lives at center—its symbolism would help define the club’s pre-launch social campaign. Landing page background, shapes and animations are defined in code rather than video to keep the load light, and may be changed to complement each night’s DJ-inspired projection design.
AvatarLabs developed extensive mood-boards, motion samples and other reference exploring the style of artist imagery and video, and adding depth to Omnia’s seductive brand voice. Customizable artist pages—incorporating video, social feeds, playlists, even merchandising—offer guests a window into each artist’s personality and passions. The image-rich Omnia Society blog accommodates everything from club life trend pieces to last night’s wildest party pics. This combination of high style and maximum flexibility allow Omnia’s promotions teams to maintain the site as they wish, and extend the brand look to complementary marketing initiatives.
Built in HTML5 and utilizing WebGL, the site is responsive across mobile and tablet. Numerous site elements—from the geometric content cluster on the homepage to image and video templates, and the main navigation—may be modified or updated via CMS. A dynamic calendar transforms from week to month view with a single click. Artists’ favorite tracks were incorporated via Soundcloud, ensuring superlative audio quality and offering a taste of what it feels like to be inside the club. Wherever artists are mentioned, they are deep-linked to specific calendar entries, event details, and playlists elsewhere in the site. Ticketing calls-to-action and VIP sales links are integrated throughout, ensuring purchase is never more than a click away.
Omnia means all or every—this is suggested by the brand’s logotype, whose letters are an inspired refashioning of the symbols representing the classical elements of sky, water, earth, air and fire. In Hakkasan’s philosophy, these elements evoke energy, the flow of the evening, the space, the crowd, and the “impact” of the club. Every night at Omnia, these elements collide in new ways, creating all-encompassing and unsurpassed experiences for every guest.
For the pre-launch social campaign, AvatarLabs fashioned the OMNIA symbols into a series of 15 beguiling video micro-experiences and debuted them on Instagram and Facebook, creating anticipation via shares and comments, and earning followers months ahead of opening weekend. Like the site, these pieces consisted of original art and motion graphics informed by our creative vision.
Presently, Omnia boasts more than 200,000 Instagram and Facebook followers. The Las Vegas launch was the subject of nonstop hype and anticipation in EDM publications such as Dancing Astronaut and Discotech, as well as national outlets such as Forbes, The Los Angeles Times and USA Today. The Las Vegas Sun summarized the club’s singular appeal, both inside the space and online: “An interactive nightlife experience for explorers of luxury conceptualized around opulence, classic design and modern technology.”
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