Published on
March 4, 2024
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Do you enjoy glancing out of a plane window to capture the ethereal beauty of clouds? Yes? Then, boy, is this not the ad for you.
With this shared experience in mind, British Airways has flipped the focus. Rather than looking out of an airplane window, BA's latest OOH campaign looks in through the window at 35,000 feet.
The 11 executions for this OOH campaign are an extension to BA's wider "A British Original" positioning, and a small diversion from the otherwise-most-recent iteration - this TV spot that aired in mid-March:
We're not going to touch on the TV ad too much. It's a lovely ad, crafted around the idea that the journeys we take make us who we are. It's a brilliant portrayal of nostalgia and discovery, and makes for a gorgeous film. But notice, right at the very end, a shot of the protagonist in baby form looking out of the window... Look familiar?
Knowing how fluid the creative process can be at agencies, there's no guarantee on the chronology of how the OOH campaign came to be. But I wouldn't be surprised if someone clever at Uncommon looked at that shot and saw something special. A baby looking out at the sky as she flies through it at hundreds of miles an hour, in total peace and wonder. In an ad all about the nostalgia for that singular shared experience. Now that's a killer ingredient to bring to a visually-led medium.
Ok, so what else went into the campaign?
The ads are simple. They barely even have a logo in them.
Nils Leonard, co-founder at Uncommon, said,
"Only truly iconic brands can say less. We're proud to unveil our latest outdoor campaign, in partnership with British Airways, which captures the enchantment of gazing through the aircraft window, revealing the diverse array of British individuals on board."
So it's clear that the ad is deliberately hyper-focused on capturing a feeling. And by tearing up the traditional OOH rulebook, BA have done that. They've paid attention to a different rulebook - as with the TV ad. One that is much more filmic in its origins. Without going deep into how Lacanian and Freudian theory slip into movies, the point is that the challenge is to get people to feel an emotion that is not happening to them.
Now that we've sufficiently made the simple much more complex, it's worth returning to the simple.
So you get an ad that shows a face. That face wears an emotion. The only reason we have is that they are on a plane.
The rest is up to the viewer.
Fittingly, that's all there is to it.
This is not a complicated campaign.
This is the Briefly Breakdown, a weekly series where we take a look at the strategy behind the latest and greatest work in the industry. Check back here for more insights to come.