Rio Mare Launch's London

We traded 135 sites across London for the four-week run: 76 static, spanning bus supersides, billboards and cross-track underground, against 59 digital, spanning roadside, retail-adjacent and underground formats. Every format was bought with a distinct job to do, not as a blanket buy split evenly for the sake of it.

• Static (76 sites) - bus supersides, billboards, cross-track underground. Held frequency, the same site in the same spot for the full four weeks.
• Digital (59 sites) - roadside, retail-adjacent, underground. Carried the dayparting and weather triggers, flexing the creative to the moment.

The trading discipline here was deliberate. Most portfolio-house plans default to digital-heavy because it's easier to change, easier to report on, easier to defend in a room. We went the other way, and built a plan with a slight lean toward static - close enough that neither format was doing the heavy lifting alon

The planning logic sat on one idea: static does something digital cannot. It sits in the same spot for the full four weeks, and the same commuter walks past it again and again across the run. Familiarity compounds in a way that rotation and reach cannot replicate on their own. Digital gave the campaign relevance in the moment. Static gave it weight.

Formats like cross-track underground and bus supersides were chosen for where they catch people, not just how often - sites that hold attention in the pause of a platform wait or a bus queue, rather than competing for it in motion.

Underneath all of it was a single planning decision: what is outdoor actually for, here, for this brand? Not conversion. Not virality. Presence, held for long enough that London stopped treating Rio Mare as a new name on the shelf.

The campaign went live across London for the full four weeks, its static and digital formats running in parallel so that the same audience met Rio Mare in the same eyeline more than one way - on the street, on the platform, and at the roadside of daily London life. It carried through into a light-touch Waitrose Bluewater activation on the ground, giving the campaign somewhere to land beyond the creative.

The campaign delivered 66.1 million impacts and reached 15.9 million people across London, built through a media plan that resisted the easy, digital-heavy default in favour of a format mix chosen for what each one could actually do. Static held the weight. Digital held the relevance. Together, they gave Bolton Group's Rio Mare a UK launch that behaved the way the brand itself does: present, considered, and built to be believed rather than noticed and forgotten.

For Bolton, it's confirmation that a brand within a 60-plus portfolio house can enter a new market without shouting on the parent's behalf. For R4, it's a working example of the proposition in practice - we trade with discipline, we plan with reason, and we activate in a way that carries straight through to the shelf.