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Ford of Britain this week, at selected shopping centres nationwide, launched an augmented reality campaign featuring the new 7 seat Grand C-MAX car on JCDecaux Innovate’s mall six-sheet screens. The campaign allows people to handle and explore miniaturised 3D ‘virtual’ models of the cars on screen and in the palm of their hand.

The campaign, created by Ogilvy & Mather in London and digital production company Grand Visual, allows users to interact with the car simply by holding their hands up to the screen. Virtual buttons allow the user to choose the colour of the car, open doors, fold the seats flat, turn the car 360 degrees and select demos of the car’s key features such as Active Park Assist.

This is the first outdoor augmented reality campaign to use 3D depth imaging technology in the UK. Rather than using a printed marker or symbol as a point of reference for interaction, the user interface is based on natural movement and hand gestures allowing any passerby to immediately start interacting with the screen content. A Panasonic D-Imager camera accurately measures the users real-time spatial depth output and Inition’s augmented reality software merges this real life footage with the 3D photo-real Grand C-MAX on screen.

The campaign was planned and booked by Mindshare and Kinetic and will run for two weeks at Bluewater, Greenhithe; Bullring, Birmingham; Metrocentre, Gateshead; St David’s, Cardiff; Princess, East Kilbride and in Westfield, Derby. This highly innovative campaign from Ford follows on from the SMAX ‘Ice Climber’ activity last year which also eschewed traditional billboards in favour of more immersive technologies which allow consumers to interact more intimately with the brand.

Mark Simpson at Ford says: “Using live interactive outdoor campaigns is a great way to really engage with the audience in a way that is not possible with static posters. This has enabled us to create a targeted and tactical campaign that is relevant and fun to use.”

Andy Dibb, Associate Creative Partner at O&M adds: “It’s eye catching, intrusive, groundbreaking and brings to life the idea of ‘Innovation in your hands’. And it’s a great way to get hold of a new C-MAX”.

Dan Dawson, Digital Director at Grand Visual concludes: “Digital outdoor enables advertisers to get closer to consumers. Ford’s clever use of the latest technology is a great fit for the next-generation C-MAX cars. Customers can get a real feel for the cars before stepping foot in a showroom”.

As part of a large multi-national holding company (WPP plc), O&M gets a bit of an unfair press sometimes, particularly when it comes to speed, or lack thereof. Unfairly or not, small boutique ad shops are always seen as more fleet of foot than lumbering old giants like O&M.

But here’s an advert for Dove which shatters that tired old preconception. It’s an ad which appeard on p38 of the Metro newspaper this morning (14th February), but which didn’t even exist 60 hours previously!

That old romantic Gerry Human (executive creative director at O&M) came up with an idea for Valentine’s Day on Friday lunchtime. By 3 o’clock that afternoon it had been sold to the global client. By 5 o’clock, when the media agency had been pretty clear that there was no way to find space for Monday, Kevin Noble in account management called Metro and booked a page using his own credit card. By 5:30pm the team had received the necessary legal blessing to run the ad without having to face the wrath of the Beatles’ lawyers.

The visual was shot on Saturday under creative director Ivan Pols’ supervision; the global client, Fernando Machado, managed to reach the UK brand team for their approval on Saturday, via the European client team; the final artwork was approved Saturday evening and delivered by Redworks on Sunday…

And today, you will see a copy of the ad on page 38 of Metro London.

Gerry says: “It’s a nice tactical piece of work that will make millions of people smile and make them feel good about Dove. I like that.”

And Hugh Baillie, CEO of O&M adds simply: “We can move fast when necessary!”

Following on from the very successful ‘Boxing Day Feet Up Feast’ over the Christmas period, the second TV instalment of O&M’s Hellmann’s “Inspire” campaign ‘Loved Up Mash’ breaks today.

The campaign opens consumers to new and exciting ways of using Hellmann’s in cooking, ways they will not have previously considered or been aware of.

After all, everybody knows Hellmann’s can serve to elevate a sandwich from the mediocre to the superior, but how many know that it also makes delicious chocolate brownies!? (at 55% less saturated fat than if substituted for butter – try it, it’s not that weird, people use salted butter after all). The campaign also includes four print executions (pop back tomorrow to see those), “Loved Up Mash”, “Fishy Delishy”, “Paradise Pasta” and, of course, “Posh Brownies” while from April the third TV ad, ‘Fishy Delishy’ will be on air.

O&M’s ‘Loved Up Mash’ uses the same cute stop-frame animation technique as the ‘Boxing Day’ commercial, contributing to a warm, homely and joyful feel that has become synonymous with the brand and will be airing on a wide range of channels through February and March.

The ads were written and art directed by Alun Howell and Guilherme Nobrega respectively, produced by Matthew Ellingham and directed by Danny Cohen.