Now in its fourth year, Advertising Week Europe is the event where people from across all areas of advertising come together. At first glance, the four-day agenda can seem daunting but key themes emerged as the week progressed.

Data, Data Everywhere

The topic of Data weaved through many sessions across the week. In a stand out session hosted by iProspect, looking at Data, Creativity, Media & Content, Will Gompertz, Arts Editor, BBC, argued there’s just as much creativity happening in data and math as in advertising and when thinking about data & creativity, context is the differentiator to determine success or failure. Rick Hearst, CEO McGarryBowen, proposed that data should be seen as a tool to be harnessed and as a key element in creative ideation. The panel concluded that by having data infiltrate the advertising ecosystem it will lead to smarter, targeted, more relevant and effective campaigns.

Creative Technology

When it comes to technology, IPG’s “Evolution or Revolution” session highlighted the importance of tech being implemented to support the creative idea and enable you to impact your audience with greater effectiveness. One example given to illustrate the alignment between creative, technology and brand strategy was the Loreal Make-Up Genius App, which provided an innovative creative tech solution, user experience and garnered great results for the brand.

Creativity in a changing ecosystem

Facebook’s session on creativity, “Stop the Scroll”, examined the ‘one size fits all’ approach to creativity. The panel urged the industry to be smarter with creative production, by having all channels baked in at the production phase, to ensure we can deliver the best content & results for our clients. The panel suggested we need to evolve from old practices in order to generate better creative solutions.

Exterion Media’s session was one of the few from the week looking at the role of Outdoor and posed the question “are we making enough of digital creativity in outdoor?”. Alan Brydon from Outsmart argued that we need to communicate more about the creative potential of Digital Outdoor. Further, he urged the industry to move towards personalisation at scale through the use of dynamic creative. It was great to hear Outsmart championing a cause we are also passionate about at GV.

The Exterion session concluded by announcing the winner of their Creative Idol Competition. We were shortlisted with Rapport for our Kung Fu Panda 3 Mobile Game concept for Fox, along with campaigns for Capital FM & Norwegian from Trigger Buzz, Jerrard Wayne and Posterscope. The GV creative team were absolutely thrilled to be announced as winners! A great way to top off a week of thought leadership & creative excellence at Advertising Week Europe.

This month sees international carrier Virgin Atlantic run a dynamic digital out of home (DOOH) campaign to support its autumn flight sale.

Running until the 23rd of the month, the creative, conceived by Y&R, features iconic symbols from global travel spots alongside current price information for popular Virgin Atlantic destinations. Pricing and destination information is tailored to screen location, giving information pertinent to the nearest Virgin Atlantic served airport.

The September sale coincides with the airline’s Dream Ticket competition in which people can enter the competition to win free flights by describing their dream Virgin destination on Twitter or Facebook accompanied by the hashtag #dreamticket. Tweets from those entering the competition are included in the creative, delivered dynamically via the DOOH campaign dashboard OpenLoop.

The dynamic DOOH campaign is running on JCDecaux D6 and Transvision screens, and MediaCo D6 in London, Edinburgh and Manchester, with media planned and bought by Talon Outdoor. Digital production was by Grand Visual, and dynamic pricing and Twitter content is managed and delivered by OpenLoop.

The Dove Invisible Dry campaign kicked off with a tactical digital experiential event at Waterloo station to coincide with Royal Ascot’s Ladies Day.  Taking advantage of one of the most fashionable days of the year, women heading to Royal Ascot were offered the chance to have a professional photograph taken.  

Grand Visual developed a custom tablet app that live-streamed selected images via OpenLoop to Motion@Waterloo. Experiential staff took a photo, and could then select or type a line of copy to be showcased to the busy station concourse, and shared across Facebook.

A live infographic displayed the spread of colours commuters were wearing on the station concourse, and was updated in real time.

Callum Galloway, Dove deodorants brand manager, added: “We are very excited to be working with Kinetic Active and Grand Visual on this unique activation. It is an amazing opportunity to bring this colourful campaign to life using ground breaking technology.”

The event was conceived and planned by N2O, with media planned and booked by Mindshare and Kinetic. Digital production was by Grand Visual.