Hasta La Creative!

One of the pre-festival favorites, British Airways’ “Magic of Flying” by OgilvyOne, London, took home the Grand Prix in the direct category at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

What it is: The campaign helped British Airways highlight the breadth of its destinations. 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 pointed out the flight’s city of origination.

The charming execution, which featured adorable children on the digital boards pointing at overhead planes, masked a technologically complex backend. It involved mounting an antennae on the roof of a building near each board. The antennae picked up data from the transponders of British Airways aircrafts within 200 kilometers and fed that information into to an application that identified the flights. The application then sent the information to a server that served 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.

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