Experiential Marketing 14 | SunMatrix Ramble

KLM: Live High Five

On 28 August, KLM connects hundreds of people in Amsterdam and New York via a live interactive video display, letting strangers on the streets of two cities come face to face.

It echoes the kind of “city to city” street connection seen before, such as the French railway (SNCF) linking Lyon and Brussels.

How the high five contest works

The twist is competitive: the connected pairs are asked to high five each other through the screens. For every successfully timed high five, participants win two tickets to New York or Amsterdam.

In global travel marketing, adding a clear participatory mechanic, meaning a simple action anyone can attempt without instruction, turns a “nice moment” into a repeatable behavior people recruit others into.

Why a high five is the right interaction

A high five is universally understood and visually obvious at distance. It is also time-bound, which creates tension. People lean in. They coordinate. They try again. That retry loop, the quick cycle of attempt, miss, adjust, and try again, is where energy builds and the crowd becomes part of the content.

Extractable takeaway: Pick an interaction that is instantly readable to bystanders, time-bound, and designed to invite visible retries. That is how the crowd becomes the amplification.

What KLM is really buying here

This is a route brand idea, meaning a story that makes a specific connection between two places feel tangible, disguised as play: KLM makes the transatlantic connection feel immediate, human, and winnable. The real question is whether your activation makes distance feel collapsible in under five seconds. This is the right kind of public interactivity when your promise is connection between places. The prize is valuable, but the real asset is the public proof that the brand can engineer connection between two cities in a way passers-by can instantly grasp.

Patterns to borrow for your own city-scale activation

Use one gesture everyone knows. The simpler the action, the more strangers will attempt it without instruction.
Add a timing challenge. Time-based coordination creates drama and repeat tries.
Make the reward match the story. Here, tickets reinforce the “two cities” premise.
Design for crowds. The best interactions are legible to bystanders, not just participants.

A few fast answers before you act

What is KLM Live High Five in one line?

A live video street installation connecting Amsterdam and New York where timed high fives between cities unlock travel tickets.

What is the key mechanism?

Two public screens link strangers in real time, then convert the connection into a simple, repeatable contest action.

Why does the high five mechanic work so well?

It is universal, physical, and instantly readable. The timing requirement creates suspense and encourages repeated attempts.

What is the biggest execution risk?

If timing feedback feels laggy or unclear, people stop retrying. The interaction needs instant, visible confirmation so the crowd stays invested.

What is the transferable lesson?

If your idea is “connection”, make people physically coordinate across distance and reward the moment with a prize that matches the narrative.

Drone-vertising: Wokker and Cup Noodles

Unmanned aircraft have been used to carry out military strikes, to film weddings, and are also being explored for product delivery from companies like Amazon, Netflix, Francesco’s Pizzeria and Flower Delivery Express.

Until the legalities of commercial use are cleared up by local governments, companies in Russia and Brazil go ahead with what are described as early drone-vertising campaigns. Drone-vertising is using drones as moving media, either by flying banners through high-attention locations or by staging a delivery moment that doubles as a filmed ad.

Airspace as a new media channel

The mechanism is straightforward. Put a message or a product on a drone. Fly it where the audience is already looking. Capture the moment on video so the stunt can travel beyond the people who witnessed it live. Because the drone enters an uninvited sightline, it creates surprise, which is why the filmed moment gets retold and replayed.

In dense urban districts where attention is scarce, brands keep searching for formats that create surprise without requiring new screen time.

The real question is whether the brand promise stays clear when the novelty fades, or whether the drone becomes the headline and the product becomes the footnote.

Russia

As ordinary advertising channels continue to be congested, Russian creative agency Hungry Boys uses drones to advertise noodle company Wokker.

Wokker banners are attached to drones and flown around high-rise business buildings in Moscow’s financial district, drawing the attention of office workers as the drones pass windows. The campaign is described as driving deliveries in the targeted area up by 40%.

Brazil

Cup Noodles, the instant ramen noodles snack from Nissin-Ajinomoto, is promoted in Brazil with drones dressed as cows, chickens, corn cobs and shrimps. A two-and-a-half minute film created for the brand’s online campaign uses drones to take Cup Noodles to surfers, skateboarders and highline walkers as they practise their sport.

Why drone-vertising gets noticed

This format works because it breaks the normal media contract. People do not expect ads to appear outside their window, and they do not expect “delivery” to arrive from above. The novelty is doing most of the work. The brand then benefits from the retelling, because the story is easy to summarise and the footage is inherently watchable. Drone-vertising is only worth doing when the brand meaning is unmistakable and the safety story is boring.

Extractable takeaway: If you are betting on a new attention surface, make the idea legible in one glance and one sentence. The stunt must communicate the category benefit instantly, otherwise the drone becomes the headline and the brand becomes a footnote.

Rules worth stealing before you fly ads

Target a context with a clear “why now”. Wokker links to lunch-time office hunger. Cup Noodles links to being hungry while out doing sport.
Design for cameras as well as eyeballs. You need a clean visual read at distance, plus a story that survives reposting.
Keep the stunt safe and bounded. The moment you look reckless, the conversation turns from clever to irresponsible.
Prove impact carefully. If you cite uplift, be ready to explain what changed, where, and for how long.

A few fast answers before you act

What is drone-vertising?

It is using drones as moving media. Either by flying banners through high-attention locations or by staging a delivery moment that doubles as a filmed ad.

Why does it work particularly well near offices or public hotspots?

Because the audience is concentrated and the environment is predictable. A drone appearing in a controlled corridor creates surprise without needing people to opt in.

What is the biggest brand risk?

Safety and permission. If the flight looks uncontrolled or disruptive, attention quickly becomes negative and the brand is blamed for the intrusion.

How do you keep the idea from becoming “tech for tech’s sake”?

Tie the drone to a simple product truth that the audience recognises instantly, like lunch delivery urgency or on-the-go convenience, then make that truth the focus of the footage.

What should you measure before you claim “uplift”?

Define the exact area and time window the stunt covered, choose a baseline for comparison, and separate what changed because of the flight itself versus what changed because the filmed story spread online.

TD Canada Trust: Automated Thanking Machine

Start with the smile. Then design backwards

Start with the smile of your audience, then work back from there. That is the key to many of the marketing campaigns people actually share. Coca-Cola has done a great job with their various happiness campaigns, followed by WestJet’s Christmas campaign where they surprised passengers with gifts.

When an ATM stops being a machine

TD Canada Trust, for its “TD Thanks You” campaign, converts select ATM machines in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver into special Automated Thanking Machines. Twenty hand-picked customers are invited to test them.

The twist is that the ATM behaves like a person. It knows their name, talks back, and responds in ways a standard ATM never would. Then it escalates into the payoff: unexpected, genuinely personal gifts that feel tailored to the customer, not to the bank.

In retail banking and other trust-based categories, surprise-and-delight, meaning an unexpected human response inside a standard service moment, works best when it turns a routine transaction into personal recognition that feels operationally real.

The video is the distribution layer

The reactions are the asset. This is less about the ATM technology than about capturing the moment people realize a faceless institution is paying attention. The real question is how a trust-heavy brand makes gratitude feel personal without making it feel fake. As reported, the video has racked up millions of views in days because the story is instantly legible: a familiar interface becomes human, and the customer response does the persuasion.

Why it lands

Banks are trained to look serious, consistent, and slightly distant. This flips that expectation without abandoning credibility, because the setting stays “bank-real” and the interaction starts from a normal ATM flow. The experience also scales conceptually. Any service brand with a repetitive touchpoint can imagine doing a version of this.

Extractable takeaway: If your category is low-emotion or low-trust, pick a familiar moment, introduce one human signal that feels impossible in that context, then let the customer reaction carry the message.

What to steal from an ATM that says “thanks”

Use a familiar interface as the stage. The more ordinary the starting point, the bigger the perceived magic when it shifts.
Personalization beats scale. One moment that feels truly “for me” outperforms ten generic giveaways.
Escalate in steps. Name recognition. Conversation. Then reward. The ramp makes the payoff believable.
Design the filming around authenticity. A hidden-camera feel is part of the proof, even when the experience is planned.

A few fast answers before you act

What is TD’s “Automated Thanking Machine”?

It is a TD ATM adapted to greet and interact with select customers, then deliver surprise gifts as part of the “TD Thanks You” campaign.

Why does the ATM format work so well?

An ATM is the definition of impersonal service. Making it behave personally creates instant contrast and instant story value.

What’s the real mechanism behind the idea?

Not the screen. The mechanism is staged personalization at a routine touchpoint, captured on video, where real customer reactions become the proof.

What makes this shareable beyond banking customers?

The narrative is universal: a machine becomes human, then gratitude becomes tangible. You do not need product context to feel it.

How can another brand apply this without copying it?

Pick one repetitive customer moment, add one unexpected human signal, then reward the customer in a way that is clearly based on who they are, not who you want them to be.