Adding innovation, experience and arm waving to Travel Retail.

Ballantine’s LAI.

Travel retail is the 4th largest market globally for Ballantine’s. Creating standout and engagement with an audience on autopilot, trapped in an enforced shopping mall/holding pen, is a key business need.

An airport strips us of our true identity— the queues, the passport, linear and processed — as it tries to ensure we are who we say we are it reduces us to a restrictive image and a number. As it does to everyone. For Ballantine’s, a brand that champions personal expression, the individual, this therefore is the perfect place to disrupt.

The challenge is to do so in an attractive, emotional and unique way. But also an entertaining one, airports are dull, people are bored.

Working in partnership with the talented AllofUS we created an innovative digital installation that allowed passers by to create a unique impression of themselves and to share it socially.

LAI seeks to remind us of our creative selves, of who we really are inside. A passport photo of tomorrow. A reminder of what it is that makes us unique.

Consisting of three 46” screens, contained in 2.5m high pods, which utilised bespoke photographic imaging software, powered by Microsoft Kinect.

Using infrared and digital cameras the installation ‘reads’ the user’s body as they approach the screen, clocking clothing colour, motion, gesture and proximity to create an algorithmically generated reflection, unique to that user alone. A new digital identity.

This personal portrait, consisting of various programmatically generated lighting and depth-of-field effects, as well as rotation, scale and motion trails, can then be manipulated by movement before the final ‘Impression’ is captured.

The software that generates the ‘Impression’ was developed in open source C++ creative coding toolkit openFrameworks.

This impression is automatically uploaded to a mobile first web gallery, and travellers can publish their profile socially from there. They are then able to discover their own drink at an iPad powered bar, and leave with a personal blend of Ballantine’s to Leave An Impression on others.

The installation was first installed at Schiphol, Amsterdam and subsequently innovated and scaled further before landing in Zurich bigger and better.

LAI’s striking aesthetic, real-time response and simple fun of use by people mostly waving their arms and jumping around meant we created something completely fresh for Travel Retail and an experience travellers genuinely enjoyed. Running twice, both for a 2 week duration, it created in excess of 10'000 unique portraits and was seen by millions. The footfall in airports is huge, and everyone has to walk in the same direction. It’s hard to ignore people laughing and waving their arms around in a environment where most people walk around with their eyes on the floor.

For the Ballantine’s brand LAI powerfully shared their beliefs, strengthened recognition as an innovator and created emotional connection, digital advocacy whilst directly connecting back to the product in bespoke sampling. And arm waving. It created lots of arm waving.