3 marketing examples that used innovative media placements in 2025

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In this Breakdown, we're looking at ✨ media placement ✨ - when creative and media decide to put aside their differences and work oh so well together.

Here’s the work from Uber, National Theatre, and Coventry Building Society.

Also - keep an eye out for next week’s edition. With the US set to lose TikTok, we’ll have a special focus on some of the great work happening on there…

1. Uber get cheeky at the airport

No hiding it, Mother are everyone’s agency crush, aren’t they?

Uber won a multi-year deal with Gatwick airport, and with agency Mother, launched a series of OOH ads to be placed all across the terminals.

The work lives under the message ‘You’re almost there’, with 2500 assets created for display across Gatwick. The ads that you’ve likely seen on LinkedIn feature an Uber “journey line” (that thing you see in the app when you’re ordering a ride) connecting you to the thing you’re really travelling for.

In departures waiting for your flight to Antalya Airport? Or are you really chasing a sunny pool day, lazily eyeing a lizard creep across the sun-warmed stone tiles?

Arriving at Gatwick from your holiday? Or are you really desperate to give your loved ones the gifts you picked up - possibly from Duty Free in a last-minute panic?

These assets are stuffed with singular, relatable holidaying insights, and it’s genuinely amazing how many Mother came up with. But sitting on top of the brilliant work is some brilliant marketing strategy. Uber have been putting out work for years trying to get people to pre-book cab rides to the airport (amongst other ‘big’ journeys), and recently have been expanding their offering to train tickets. This media partnership is a big move to keep hammering at that nail - that Uber can sort you out for more than just hops across town when TfL is letting you down.

There’s also (supposedly) a bunch of collateral, including better wayfinding around the airport. Which just adds to the idea. “You’re almost there”, and Uber’s the brand that gets you there.

This is a big media partnership - spanning several years and involving literally thousands of assets. Not only does the creative more than do it justice, but the entire campaign from idea to execution feels like it’s just been wrapped up so nicely. With a bow on top. 10/10, this one’s a banger.

2. National Theatre Live put you on the edge of your seat

It’s always been a brilliant idea, and now it has a brilliant campaign.

National Theatre Live take filmed performances of live theatre productions, and put them on in special screenings at cinemas across the UK.

As someone who loves theatre but doesn’t go as much as I’d like (time, money etc), it’s such a simple, fantastic idea to stretch NT’s assets. I watched the stunning and horrifying Prima Facie at a cinema late last year, thinking “it has been such a long time since I’ve sat down in one of these chairs and felt this range or intensity of emotions”. And that’s what this campaign focuses on.

A chair stands as a metaphor for everything you could feel watching a play on the big screen. Suspended, enflamed, enraptured and in wonder. Theatre is genuinely magical in a way that blockbuster cinema often isn’t, and Benedict Cumberbatch promises that you’ll get all that magic “from the best seat in the house”.

The campaign is running in OOH and social video, but it’s the film that will play in cinemas that is the hot ticket. Of course, it is the most obvious media placement for this campaign. But the film is so well made for its placement. The fact that it addresses the audience directly makes it feel like the classic cinema pre-amble that dramatically tells you to turn off your phone. But it also feels sorta like a movie trailer by itself. It’s dramatic and visually stunning, with a stage and screen star fronting it. It just works so well.

3. As good a double act as Dick and Dom In Da Bungalow

Maybe. That’s a big claim, now that I think about it.

Coventry Building Society bought The Co-operative Bank. Don’t worry, I won’t get into an analysis of the finances of such a deal. I do completely understand them though, I’m just not telling you.

Anyway - acquisitions like this can be a little sticky. Customers could feel indifferent (at best), annoyed (at worst) or just a bit confused (middling). So the two brands have launched the campaign “All together even better”. That’s right, it’s a joint campaign.

It makes perfect sense - the two will have joint custody of the kids. Co-operative Bank customers will still be Co-operative Bank customers, for now. But the plan is for them to eventually become members of the Coventry Building Society. After a bit of a blip for Co-op (previously, it was owned by its customers, but after a takeover about 10 years ago to help keep the bank alive, it was owned by shareholders and investors), the bank will return to being owned by individual members. That ownership model has been part of Co-op since it was born, and is an important thing to the way both brands are run, managed, and perceived by the public.

And the campaign lands that perfectly.

This is a friendly partnership, an agreement between friends - not a corporate takeover. Both are brands that you can trust, because they are both owned by their members and they both trust each other. Amongst the veeeeery traditional banking blue, the copy is playful and warm. They might look like banks, but they don’t sound like them. And what else contributes to this?

That’s right - the media placement. Two ads, side by side. Simple as that. It’s a great bit of media thinking. What more to say?

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