British Airways Surprises Mother With Unexpected Visit From her Son

British Airways - Visit Mum

According to 2010 US Census Data there are 1.7 million India-born people living in America. Ratnesh is one of them, leaving the city of Mumbai at the age of 17 for a new life in New York City.

In this beautifully shot clip created by Ogilvy New York to promote British Airways’ “It’s time to Visit Mum!” campaign, we meet Ratnesh and his mother. They’ve stayed in touch, but she hasn’t seen her son in person in the 15 years since he home.

The agency has asked her to prepare her son’s favorite meal, and they will deliver it to him via British Airways. What his mother doesn’t know is that the airline has arranged for Ratnesh to fly home to surprise his mother in person. Watch the clip below, then call you mum.

If you’d like to try the recipe for Bhindi it’s available as a PDF on the British Airways website.

[via Creative Criminals]

USA

Ogilvy Deploys Purposeful Outdoor Ads to Promote IBM Smarter Cities

IBM Smarter Cities

IBM and the Paris office of ad agency Ogilvy & Mather have created a series of outdoor advertising with an added practical purpose. The colorful ad installations were constructed to include a bench, an overhang to provide shelter from the rain, and a ramp to help people more easily navigate stairs.

The campaign promotes IBM’s “People for Smarter Cities” initiative, which looks to bring people from around the world together to collaborate on solutions that improve the ways that cities function.

[via Gute Werbung]

France

Dove Dupes Photoshop Users With Fake Beautify Tool

Dove Beautify Photoshop Actions

This is an example of a non-traditional ad initiative where the real payoff is really the PR generated from the idea of the concept, rather than the results of its exposure to its proposed targeted user.

The Idea: After nearly a decade of promoting real beauty, Dove wanted to reach out directly to the art directors, graphic designers, photo manipulators who use Adobe Photoshop to manipulate, retouch and create the perfect (yet unreal) look in photographs of models and celebrities.

One of my first creative industry jobs was to cleanup and retouch the photos of models for advertising and beauty product displays. The work included the usual cleanup of small skin imperfections, but also more elaborate manipulation including whitening of teeth, enhancing or changing eye colour, or in extreme cases the complete substitution of a limb if it happened to be positioned awkwardly.

The Toronto offices of OgilvyOne created a Photoshop Action called ‘Beautify’ (an Action is set of instructions that can be completed with a single click click) was posted to the tutorial and software sites frequented by Photoshop users.

When the file was downloaded, installed and then used in Photoshop it reversed the recent retouching work, and added the message “Don’t manipulate our perceptions of real beauty” to the image. The Photoshop user could simply select undo to return to their original work.

Did any designers get duped with this? Highly unlikely. Will this continue a discussion about the manipulation of images? Absolutely.

[via Ads of the World]

Canada