Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Have you seen this ad campaign for Expedia around London?

The Expedia print campaign from Ogilvy uses airport IATA codes to great effect: just don't expect to see any references to Fukuoka. It's truly creative work, beautifully executed.










The campaign was created by Jon Morgan and Mike Watson. "It all started when we saw a woman walking through Heathrow with the word FUK hanging from her suitcase," they say. "Turned out she'd just flown in from Fukuoka in Japan. That got us thinking, 'maybe there are more'."

Indeed there were – over 9,000 airports around the world, each with its own 3-letter IATA code used to identify the destination of bags.

"We trawled through each and every one looking for useable words, half-words and 'almost words'," the team say. "It's amazing what the brain pieces together and makes sense of."

So did they write the copylines to fit the available codes or vice versa? "Some just happened straight away, some we went looking for like WSH EWE WRE ERE [Brookhaven, Ewer Indonesia, Whangarei, Erave] and SUN SEA SND SEX [Sun Valley, Seattle, Seno, Sembach] as they were travel specific," they explain.

"Others came from writing all the useable codes we could find on a huge sheet of paper and just slogging away until words or phrases made us smile. Each code is real, we tried to get real tags but each one is numbered for security reasons so we made faithful reproductions to get round the problem. We designed, printed, aged and then photographed, took a long time but we wanted it to be as real as it could be.

"At one point we had 36 ads mocked-up. 9 executions eventually ran. There were some amazingly rude ones, which unfortunately will never see the light of day..."

Source: Creative Review