Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
Well, it appears that DailyDOOH and its readers aren’t the only ones who found the wonderful British Airways ‘Magic of Flying’ advertising campaign interesting.
The campaign, which we wrote about last November when it first appeared on Clear Channel Storm’s Chiswick Towers and again on Piccadilly Circus took home the Grand Prix in the direct category at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Developed by OgilvyOne, the British Airways campaign helped the airline highlight the breadth of its destinations. The digital billboards in key London locations featured creative that encouraged passers by to look up and spot the aircraft flying overhead. A message on the board showed (weather permitting) real-time data of the plane in question, including city of origin, destination and flight number.
The creative execution, which featured children on the digital billboards pointing at planes flying overhead, masked a complex backend. An antennae on the roof of a building near each board picked up data from the transponders of BA aircraft within 200 kilometers and fed that information into an application that identified the flights. The application then sent the information to a server that displayed the messages about the plane’s destination or origination. A trigger zone acted as a trip wire to determine when a plane should instigate a message and cloud altitude data determined if the plane could actually be seen.
The win was unanimous among the 26-person jury, headed by James McGrath, creative chairman of Clemenger BBDO Melbourne. We especially liked the comment of Liz Ross, a jury member and North American president for BPM, who said the ultimate question the jury tried to answer was “What is work we’re going to remember in 10 years? We didn’t want to pick something fleeting or flavour of the month.”
McGrath said during a press conference that the jury noted how British Airways connected the billboard creative to its key objectives and its call to action: getting people to go to its ‘Look Up’-branded site. ‘Look up’ also lived as a hashtag (#LookUp), and BA surrounded the ad with a series of clever engagements that ensured it was widely shared.
The closest contender for the Grand Prix was ‘Sound of Honda’ from Dentsu, Tokyo, a sound-and-light installation that recreated Ayrton Senna’s 1989 world-record-setting lap on the Japanese F1 circuit.
The jury awarded 18 gold Lions, 17 silvers and 39 bronzes.
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