"The client was very brave, as there was no way they could approve what we were doing in advance – it was a bit of a leap in the dark," explains John Treacy, creative director at agency Elvis, of its ground-breaking outdoor advertising campaign for Virgin Trains.
His statement sounds like every client's worst nightmare, and anathema to traditional advertising practice. But Treacy insists innovation necessitates a certain amount of risk. Virgin Trains, he says, has that risk in its DNA: "A client like Virgin, which may not have massive budgets, is looking for innovation. That often means new technology, stuff that is perhaps a bit untested," he says.
The risk paid off: at the Best Awards last year the campaign amassed a haul of five gongs, including, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Best of the Best award.
Virgin wanted to promote the fact that travel times between London and Liverpool had dropped dramatically. Elvis sat down with outdoor advertising firm Ocean to work out how they might use the Liverpool digital wall, the largest of its kind in Europe, to develop a cutting-edge campaign.
Elvis turned the site into a live, interactive poster by having copywriter Rick Kiesewetter, hidden from view, improvise lines for the digital screen. The lines referenced whatever was happening near the billboard and, using a giant arrow, were often directed at individuals, such as "Awwh baby in the pram! Try strolling in London" or "Hey there Mr Bus Driver, by the time you get to Warrington we'll be in Euston".
The effect was to "give the poster a mind of its own", while also promoting Virgin's train times, to get the advertising message across. But making it work in practice required a completely different approach to creativity, with even the on-the-day delivery requiring unorthodox thinking (there can't be many campaigns, after all, where the creative director keeps lookout with a walkie-talkie to alert the copywriter to potential "targets").
In fact, Treacy says it was a meeting with Elvis's technology department that got the idea moving. "We actually had to write the software to make the idea happen," he says. "Most agencies keep their tech guys in a dark basement but we have them sitting in the middle of the creative department. It is how it has to be if you want to make a little bit of a leap in the dark and do something that hasn't been done before."
As a sector, digital outdoor advertising managed that rare thing during 2009's downturn – growth – and agency Kinetic estimates revenues will be up a healthy 12% this year, to £82m. At the same time, digital billboard sites are being developed at Heathrow Terminal 5, London Underground is overhauling its sites and Ocean is rolling out more than 20 large digital screens.
But perhaps even more exciting are the implications for the sector as a whole. For years, advertisers have talked about making the personalisation depicted in films such as Minority Report a reality. As the Virgin campaign proves, the technology has arrived. Now it's up to the industry to exploit the creative opportunity.
