Gold at PR Moment 2026 — The Story Behind Observatory's Kinly Campaign at the London Stock Exchange
- Observatory
- Feb 6
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 27
In early 2026, a project that had begun as a corporate animation commission for Kinly — one of the world's leading AV and unified communications integrators — returned an unexpected result: Gold at the PR Moment Awards 2026.
The piece in question was Workflow — an animated artwork drawn from Observatory founder Ben Sheppee's personal fine art series, Lucid. Displayed at Kinly's flagship installation at the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) headquarters, the work was created to accompany Kinly's Art of Productivity campaign and the wider AV transformation of LSEG's Paternoster Square atrium.
The Lucid Series: Fine Art Meets Commercial Context
The Lucid series is part of Ben Sheppee's personal fine art practice — a body of work exploring distorted and dissolving text, where the familiar becomes unstable, where language breaks down at the edges of consciousness and dream. It's abstract, typographic, and deeply conceptual work that has been shown at gallery level.
Bringing that sensibility into the London Stock Exchange — one of the world's oldest and most storied financial institutions, whose roots trace back to 1698 when John Castaing began issuing a list of stock and commodity prices — was a deliberate creative decision. The juxtaposition of abstract, fluid visual language against the rigour and precision of global financial infrastructure created a tension that made the work more interesting, not less. Workflow felt appropriate precisely because it was unexpected.
The LSEG AV Environment
Kinly's broader project at LSEG was a substantial AV transformation. LSEG tasked Kinly with revitalising the existing Market Ceremony experience with the creation of an audio-visual spectacle that truly reflects the momentousness of the occasion. The installation included an impressive eight-metre-wide NEC 0.9mm pixel pitch LED video wall as the visual centrepiece on the first-floor balcony of the light-flooded atrium. Observatory's Workflow animation was created specifically for this environment — a large-format, architecturally integrated LED canvas at the heart of one of the City's most prominent buildings.
Gold at PR Moment Awards 2026
The PR Moment Awards recognise outstanding public relations and communications campaigns across the UK. That an animated artwork created for a corporate AV installation should win Gold in this context speaks to something important: when visual content is made with genuine creative ambition, it travels beyond its immediate context. It becomes a story worth telling. It earns coverage, attention and recognition that transactional content never achieves.
That's the Observatory philosophy in practice — and the PR Moment Gold is a gratifying validation of it.
