“May we haveth your attention.”

British Airways’ latest safety video is old school. Like, stuck in the 19th Century. It’s a must-see and ranks among the best work in the travel category so far this year.

Creative studio Uncommon stages a lavish costume drama with exquisite production values. We get country manors and ornate drawing rooms with lords and ladies in foppish, frilly attire and outrageous wigs. Modern BA staff school these folks of yore on how to stay safe at 30,000 feet.

ARISTOCRATIC LADY (grasping a laptop): What witchcraft is this? The painting, it moves!

COURTESANS: Gasp and faint.

FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Devices, including laptops, must be switched off and placed in your luggage for takeoff and landing.

Some especially inspired bits unfold among mounted horsemen.

RIDER 1: Do I smell the winds of war?

RIDER 2: I see smoke on the horizon.

FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Smoking, including e-cigarettes, vaping and the use of other smoking devices, is not permitted at any time.

Later, the troopers fasten their seatbelts securely, per instructions, before charging into battle.

“We know that these videos deliver vital safety information, and it is so important that we keep our customers engaged, so we have created a video that captures the audience’s attention, using humor to do so,” says Calum Laming, BA’s chief customer officer.

Director Sharon Maguire (Bridget Jones’s Diary) crams impressive historical detail into every frame, infusing each vignette with BBC-level visual appeal and a Monty Pythonesque sense of absurdity

Some of the dialogue and character reactions—”Is it a winged creature of the air or, perchance, a celestial contrivance navigating the skies?”—is priceless.

Yet, the vital message never gets lost amid the pomp and circumstance. These drawing-room antics should hold the attention of even the most distracted, cynical passengers. (Heck, we’d ask them to play it again.)

Three-time Oscar winning British costume designer Jenny Beavan (The King’s Speech) developed the fashions. 

The cast—including 40 BA employees in key roles—worked with dialect coach Jill McCullough (Mama Mia) to nail their accents.

A tad creepy perhaps. Whoa! Is that face watching me? Ultimately, though, the effect works in the campaign’s favor. It’s just so memorable.

“This concept plays on the idea that customers usually take photographs from their seat out of the aircraft window, but instead, reversing the camera and spotlighting customers’ emotions as they look onto their destination, ” Uncommon explains in press materials.

Such visuals, “can give a deeper insight into their unique stories and original reasons for travel.”

Pulitzer Prize-nominated photographer Christopher Anderson helped develop the initiative. Both the animated and static executions work equally well, conveying the notion of spirited discovery which is every airline’s stock in trade.

The work breaks today across 324 locations around the U.K., including London’s Piccadilly Circus.

So, these tykes are dreaming of airline commercials. Who knew?

Kidding aside, it’s a fresh framing device and novel approach for a category with few new flight plans left to unfurl.

“This film shows the beauty of flying and how it puts us out into the world to reveal to ourselves who we are,” says director Miles Jay, who developed the work with creative studio Uncommon. 

Newborns are, after all, at the start of life’s journey. Weaving that conceit into a travel narrative makes sense. Jay’s occasionally fuzzy frames—fusing the infant’s dream images with cabin interiors—lend the :60 an appealing art-house allure.

Saint Saviour’s “I Remember” amplifies the ethereal vibe. It’s meditative, but soars with a pop sensibility above the level of a simple ambient soundscape.

“The work showcases the many journeys British Airways takes us on and the role they play in shaping our lives and who we become,” says Lucy Jameson, cofounder of Uncommon.

The film began breaking last night across Channel 4, ITV and Sky in the U.K., with OOH elements to follow.

Before imploding spectacularly, the year started off so well for cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which enticed Larry David to star in his very first TV ad—on the Super Bowl no less. The spot, from DentsuMB, was well received during the game, though ironically, Larry’s reluctance in the ad to embrace FTX actually proved to be prescient.

Read more here.

9️⃣

Adidas Tweets Bare Breasts To Promote Its Inclusive Line of Sports Bras

In one of the year’s most provocative campaigns, Adidas hoped to normalize bare breasts of all shapes and sizes with #SupportIsEverything, a campaign that began with a tweet showing dozens of naked breasts to promote an upcoming line of sports bras that includes 43 styles and 72 sizes. In May, the U.K. Advertising Standards Agency decided the campaign—created by TBWANeboko—would “likely cause widespread offense” and it was banned.

Read more here.

8️⃣

Louis Vuitton’s Messi/Ronaldo Ad Is Even More Brilliant Than It Looks

The Qatar World Cup gave us plenty of great—and not-so-great—marketing moments, but none were as instantly iconic as Louis Vuitton’s print ad featuring Lionel Messi of Argentina, the eventual champion, playing Portuguese superstar Cristiano Ronaldo at chess. The positioning of the pieces—replicating a board from a 2017 match between grandmasters Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura—was an all-time great easter egg as well.

Read more here.

7️⃣

Pringles Will Pay You $25,000 to Work as an NPC in a Video Game

We saw a bunch of engaging gaming campaigns this year, but this effort from Pringles U.K. and Grey London stood out by offering player a chance to work in a video game as an NPC (non-player character), refilling Pringles vending machines in Train Sim World. The idea emerged from the overarching campaign theme, “Stay in the game,” due to Pringles being less messy than other snacks and easier to eat while gaming.

Read more here.

6️⃣

British Airways’ New Ads Will Make You Love Copywriting Again

Uncommon in London created one of our favorite print/OOH campaigns of 2022, crafting an impressive 500 unique executions—with no visuals whatsoever, just simple and evocative copy lines. The ads were modeled after the forms you fill out upon arrival in a new destination—though in addition to “business” or “leisure,” each execution added a third option, exploring the variety of reasons so many of us travel.

Read more here.

5️⃣

The Story Behind Nike’s Amazing 3-D Air Max Billboard in Japan

For the 35th anniversary of Nike Air Max Day, Nike Japan pulled out all the stops, working with creative collective CEKAI to make a eye-catching 3-D billboard outside Shinjuku Station in Tokyo. We saw a number of 3-D billboards like this in 2022, but this was one of the best.

Read more here.

4️⃣

DirecTV Lampoons Ghostbusters With Help From 4 Baseball Greats

DirecTV and TBWAChiatDay L.A. stuffed this spot full of retired baseball greats—Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson—who teamed up as the “GOATbusters” (Ghostbusters: Afterlife had just arrived on DirecTV) to battle a giant version of Cincinnati Reds mascot Mr. Redlegs. 

Read more here.

3️⃣

Coinbase and Its QR Code Win the Super Clio as Super Bowl’s Best Ad

The Super Bowl is always full of spectacle: celebs, special effects, Puppy Monkey Babies. But this year, the Super Clio—bestowed by a jury of top industry creatives—was awarded to the most captivatingly lo-fi spot of the game. Accenture Interactive’s ad for crypto brand Coinbase featured 60 seconds of a QR code bouncing around a screen, one of the most audacious direct-marketing ploys in history.

Read more here.

2️⃣

What’s Up With Prime Video’s Freakishly Elongated Football?

Prime Video took over coverage of Thursday Night Football this fall, and its marketing for the broadcasts included this completely bogus story about an elongated football that quarterbacks could throw further—more than the length of a football field, supposedly. Wilson created 33 of the balls for real, and even though everyone knew it was a prank, the campaign, from agency Atlantic New York, was all over mainstream media.

Read more here.

1️⃣

Bud Light’s ‘Real Men of Genius.’ The Making of a Radio Classic

Season 2 of our Tagline podcast rolled out back in the spring, and it was the fourth episode, about the making of Bud Light’s “Real Men of Genius” campaign, that got the most listens. We revisited the campaign’s greatest hits with folks on the agency, client and production sides—to see how a the idea blossomed into a decade-long entertainment franchise that spawned 200 radio spots, as well as TV ads, compilation CDs and even live events.

Read more here.

The work is tagged “A British original.” And while a few of the executions lean into that idea (the billboard above is one of the best), the concept is much more universal than that. “A British original” feels like BA trying to keep a foot in its usual patriotic messaging, whereas the campaign’s strength is really how it goes well beyond that. In fact, the work calls to mind Citibank’s old “Live Richly” campaign from Fallon, which similarly explored more emotional territory in a category obsessed with service messages.

Here are some more headlines from the campaign:

There are also some short films—32 of them in fact, which will run over the course of a month. Check out seven of them below.

Uncommon says the OOH creative will adapt “according to location, time of day, weather and what’s happening in the news.” MG OMD handled planning and buying. The campaign will appear on TV, video on demand, cinema, radio, print, display, social and out of home, including Piccadilly Lights and Heathrow.

BA is also working on a new safety video which will “showcase British Airways’ people, alongside some of the most well-known and much loved British talent.”

CREDITS

Client: British Airways
Creative Studio: Uncommon
Media Agency: MG

With Ryan Reynolds, the parodies just keep coming.

Fresh off a meta ad-spoof promo hyping both Kraft Mac & Cheese and his film The Adam Project, Reynolds presents a tipsy—purportedly “rejected”—take on airline safety videos.

British Airways just introduced Aviation Gin aboard its long- and short-haul flights. Reynolds, who co-founded the spirts brand, naturally urges passengers to “ensure that your seatbelt is fastened whenever drinking it.”

“Spilling even one drop of the world’s highest-rated gin will result in you being duct-taped to your seat for the remainder of the flight,” warns Reynolds, in the spot made with agency Maximum Effort.

We learn that product samples will drop from an overhead panel if lost the cabin loses pressure, while bottle-shapes flotation devices are also on hand, just in case.

Ultimately, Reynolds decides the ad might be getting too “reckless.” Alas, he doesn’t slip in a reference to Wrexham, the British soccer team he co-owns. Maybe next time.

Here, as ever, Reynolds’ delivery and charisma—smarmy, aw-shucks and edgy, all at the same time—seemingly run on autopilot.

The man’s established an eponymous sub-genre built on cultural awareness and personal style, conjuring up a special mode of advertising: mildly subversive and good-naturedly smug, with viewers always in on the joke.

Though rarely fall-down funny, the schtick remains amusingly on point. Unlike some other stabs at commercial comedy we could name, Reynolds consistently stays on course for brands amid the silliness and satire.