Ambient advertising project

Working as sole providers The Hamilton Project were commissioned to create and deliver a project for the Ideas Foundation. The brief for the project outline was for it to include an element of physicality or robotics as a part of a creative solution.

We set an open ambient advertising brief to the foundation degree students of Wigan & Leigh College. The students had free reign over context with a variety of supplied situations to call upon should they require further direction. This unrestricted direction was to best ensure the desired medium of solutions proffered. Namely that all would be physical ambient answers.

Ambient advertising is advertising that’s found in our surroundings. Examples would range from ads printed on the back of cinema tickets, floor stickers in supermarkets and on supermarket trolleys to the more involving and unusual format examples like Volkswagens’ worlds deepest bin and staircase piano. Or for more traditional service or product targeted examples see ad's from Juice Salon, Volvo, and Science World. Our surroundings and the environment we live in increasingly include the online world, the term ambient advertising has come to include unconventional campaigns on the web, as well as it’s initial out-of-the-home only definition, often combining with viral strategies. One of the biggest benefits of ambient advertising is that in comparison with traditional methods, it can generate a lot of attention from the media, as well as consumers, often placing small ground-roots marketing campaigns in front of mass audiences. It does so by removing the familiar, communicating to you in new ways that hold your attention.

The winning team selected by an industry panel to have their presented ambient advertising campaign worked up by our industry standard artworkers was ‘The Hats’ team consisting of Matt Page, Simon Fairhurst and Nathan Greennough-Bowdler. Their campaign was the most thought through, the most coherently and professionally presented, and had a relevant hard-hitting concept running throughout.

The idea was a campaign for The Samaritans highlighting the number of people choosing to commit suicide by throwing themselves from buildings, bridges etc. One of the most common methods used in England to commit suicide. The campaign would involve a series of disturbing staged events where dummies would drop from the top of well-known city landmarks. ‘Fake’ film crews would capture the events on tape first hand for use in further stages in the campaign.

 There would be many technical aspects involved and variables to control with the strategy: controlling the dummies trajectory using wires, utilising the filmed footage via a variety of formats including viral blogs, the shocking nature of the campaign helping to generate further momentum and additional free media coverage.