Leaving the logo behind
Still proving a divisive decision, British Airways turned the camera back at their passengers - leaving out their logo.
In an OOH campaign featuring 11 executions, British Airways drew on the very universal insight that people like to look out of planes when they're flying. It's not very "smart" or "nuanced" or "culturally relevant" - it's a plain and simple insight about how people behave when travelling. The ads themselves are deliberately simple. They cut off the brand name, but leave enough for the ad to be recognisably BA. In the words of Nils Leonard (founder at Uncommon Studio, the agency who worked on the campaign), “Only truly iconic brands can say less. The magazine you notice most is the one with the least on the cover; the same is true of posters. We’re proud to share our latest outdoor with our partners – capturing the magic of that window view in a new place, the many different faces that board a BA plane – each and every one a British original.” Work like this is often divisive. It's unclear what metric the brand wants to shift, and the sparsity of the ads means everyone gets invited to a mass creative review on Twitter and LinkedIn. So you're totally at the mercy of social media commenters "not getting it." Like this guy, who said "They look like prisoners seeing daylight for the first time, so no, it's not good." The biggest decision ended up being leaving the logo only half-visible. Pure marketing theory says that's a real no-no, but for British Airways, can anyone really say they didn't recognise who or what was being advertised?
The work
