Magic of Flying
Client: British Airways
We built the world’s first billboards that reacted every time a BA plane was flying overhead. The kids on the ads would magically point at the aircraft while displaying flight number, origin of the flight and dynamic retail messaging.
I worked closely with the creative director to develop the backend prototype that triggered the billboard.
Skills:
NodeJS
PHP
MongoDB
NginX
Initially we tried using the data from online flight trackers (eg. Flight Radar 24) but, the lack of consistency on the delay from the third party platform, meant that we had to do all the work. To solve the issue, we installed an ADSB antenna to a server on a roof in Piccadilly that collected data from every aircraft’s transponder within 200km.
The local server ran Node.js and, through a serial library, read the data from every transponder broadcasting and pushed to a cloud server only the data coming from British Airways aircrafts.
On the cloud, a PHP script would store all the data into MongoDB and check if any aircraft was present in the area above the billboard. Whenever that happened, we would run a lookup function to find the flight number and origin of the flight, and send the notification to the billboard. If for any reason, we failed to find the flight because the callsign wasn’t recognised, the billboard would not trigger.
We also linked a weather API, including a cloud height sensor, to automatically disable triggering the billboard if the clouds were too low or if the visibility wasn’t good enough.
TL;DR
What should have been a very simple project using live data from just one API, ended up being a complex architecture that processed raw data broadcast directly from the aircrafts, weather API and dedicated sensors.
Awards:
1x Cannes Grand Prix
5x Cannes Gold Lions
3x D&AD Yellow Pencils
2x One Show Award
Clio Awards
London International Award
Webby Award
Creative Circle
DMAs
Creative Out of Home Award
Digital Out of Home Award
BIMA Award
Lovie Award
Campaign Big Award
Creative Review Annual.