Looks like Taylor Swift really does love the English! After touring continental Europe this summer for her Eras tour, Taylor Swift this week continues her love story with London as she returns to the capital for the second time in 2 months to shake it off and bejewel the crowd.

With a total of 151 shows globally, this is the highest-grossing tour ever, becoming the first to pass $1 billion US dollars in revenue.  However the well documented Swiftonomics effect of the tour extends well beyond simple ticket sales and is expected to boost the UK economy by £1bn.

Taylor Swift is in her element. Whilst it will be a cruel summer for those unable to get tickets to the shows, those lucky enough to get their hands on them await her return with a James Dean daydream look in their eyes.

But it’s not just the gig-going Swifties who should be just as excited, as there is a bounty of opportunities for advertisers to capitalise on.

London is loaded with advertising opportunities to target the estimated 450k fans going to the shows this august. From targeting the venues where Taylor’s performing, to the restaurants she frequents and locations she’s filmed her music videos, there are a range of ‘Swift Spots’ in and around the capital that advertisers could consider using to reach this high spending audience.

OOH, Look What You Made Me DOOH
OOH is perfectly placed to offer geo-targeting and contextual relevance for advertisers wanting to tap into Taylor-mania. Conveniently, it’s not 1989 anymore and with the rise and rise of digital OOH capabilities and availability in London, advertisers have greater creative scope and flexibility to quickly deploy tactical campaigns and reach these audiences than ever before.  

Additionally, with Route providing gold standard audience data for the OOH industry, we can evaluate which ads are best placed to deliver the most for advertisers. In the analysis below we take a closer look to see what Route data shows about the Swift Spots that Taylor is linked to.

I Know Places (that Taylor goes)

Below we outline 10 locations (Swift Spots) across London which Taylor Swift is associated with, these range from venues where she has performed, to places she frequents and locations that feature in her music videos and highlight the OOH advertising opportunities that exist in proximity to them (Swift Zones).

The spatial analysis shows that within 1000 metres of these locations, there are over 11,000 frames, and more than 3 billion impacts every fortnight. The frames with the highest number of weekly impacts are in underground stations around Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street, which are located within catchment of BBC Radio HQ, where she has performed some of her top hits, like “London Boy”, and also the Hard Rock Café, where one of her dresses is displayed.

Other Swift spots include the The Black Dog – a pub located in Vauxhall rumoured to be the muse of one of her more recent songs with the same name. The place was flooded by so many Taylor Swift fans when the song first came out that the pub now offers Taylor Swift themed burgers and cocktails.

Another spot, a kebab shop called the “Kentish Delight”, is rumoured to be Taylor’s favourite kebab shop in London and was featured in her End Game video (with Ed Sheeran). Of course, this is not new news to Swifties, who know these places all too well.

Returning to the heart of the Eras Tour in London, Wembley Stadium, we see that within 1000 metres of Wembley Stadium, there are over 150 OOH locations, including 16 digital screens.

With an event audience in excess of 450,000 travelling to Wembley across the 5 days in august things are set to be unusually busy around the stadium. As such, we anticipate the audience numbers for the OOH inventory in the area will be even higher than the typical audiences that Route reports.

TFL data, supplied by Global shows that for the three days when Taylor was last in town (21-23 June) Wembley Stadium underground station had 461,271 entries and exits which compared to 198,202 for the corresponding period the week before, an increase of 232.7%.

Further to this, data from Open Media (who operate the Boxpark screens on Wembley Way) shows an audience spike of 139% uplift for the three days when Taylor was last in town compared to the following week.

Taylor Swift's return to London isn't just a spectacle for her fans—it's an opportunity for advertisers to strike a chord with an audience that will be down bad (in a good way), highly engaged, and likely to spend more than the average person (an estimated 12 times the average). By leveraging the OOH locations in our dashboard among others around the capital, brands can craft strong campaigns with a message that will stay, stay, stay, in the minds of Taylor Swift fans. With Route data, you’re never on your own, kid.

…Are you ready for it?

Note: The dashboard uses data from Route R51 (Q2 2024) and includes audience data from a fortnight in august.