Interactive digital supports to enhance commercial creativity and generate emotions

The result of the campaign carried out by the outdoor advertising company Clear Channel has been as simple as it has been effective., on one of its Play digital media located in the Stockholm metro (Sweden), para la compañía pharmaceutica Apotek Hjärtat, whose hair products achieved a subtly interactive and moving effect every time the trains arrived at the station.

The outdoor advertising specialist Clear Channel has achieved not only the success of the digital campaign carried out for the Swedish pharmaceutical company Apotek Hjärtat, in order to promote their new skin and hair products on one of their digital signage supports of the Play model, located in the Stockholm metro, but has shown the dynamic and interactive possibilities offered by its circuit of screens to capture the attention of the audience and satisfy the needs of its advertisers..

The differential of this project responds to a solution that is as simple as it is effective to activate a video track on the digital screen., equipped with ultrasonic sensors adapted to detect the arrival of the train, to achieve a subtly interactive effect that has not gone unnoticed by passersby at the Odenplan station of the Stockholm metro.

Creativity and technology

The production of this clever advertisement, which was originally scheduled to take place only for one day and given the success achieved (with records in 150 countries and more 1,7 millions of unique visits on social networks) has been extended to more than a week, aimed to find a solution in digital support that, upon arrival of the convoy at the station, had a dynamic effect on the content displayed on the screen.

In this initial phase of creativity, technology and emotional connection, as those responsible for Clear Channel point out, the creative agency Akest Holst and the producer Stop Family, “The idea was to work and play with the air currents that are created when the train reaches the platform, and to make the hair of the model that appeared on the screen move naturally when said current occurred on the subway platform”.

Later, It was also necessary to prevent the image of the model from appearing static while waiting for the train to arrive at the station., Therefore, a production was designed that allowed the movement of the face., the eyes and hands of the model, until finally the animation produced by the air current at the arrival of the convoy was activated.

Making of

To carry out this campaign, The Play digital screen was modified with the incorporation of ultrasonic sensors made by the Swedish production company Stopp Family, that were activated upon the arrival of each convoy to the subway platform.

These sensors were calibrated by the technicians of this company to detect the arrival of the train using a socketserver Python, via the Internet TCP protocol, to create continuous sequences of data between the client (a flash application that received the signal at medium distance) and the server synchronously to activate and play the video on the screen.

In this sense, One of the challenges of this project was to specify the exact moment in which the video content had to be played.. Technicians from the Stopp Family production company calculated that the distance when the train was on the platform was about 4 metros, while when he was not on the platform the distance was about 7 metros.

To avoid errors when activating the video, They set a distance that ranged between 3,9 y 4,1 metros, and subsequently three sequences were determined with a distance greater than 7 meters before the video came back on.

These two rules eliminated the possibility that the same train could activate the video more than once and that it in turn would be activated when passengers passed through the platform..

As explained by Stopp Family, “The result has been a success.”: The hair of the model on the screen moves, trapped by the turbulence generated when the train reaches the platform.. We have managed to create new technical solutions that allow us to define new interactive platforms and, instead of changing ads to adapt to technology, “We can adapt technology to creative ideas in advertising”.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/rAw0piXQJD0[/youtube]