Norwegian Airlines created an interactive experience that enabled visitors in an Oslo shopping mall to control a New York City taxi in real-time. A special tour guide in the taxi also helped the interested visitors discover New York City while creating awareness around Norwegian Airlines direct long-haul destinations from Oslo to New York, Miami, LA, San Francisco, and Bangkok.
Social media and mobile devices have driven fundamental changes in consumer behaviour and opened up new avenues for consumers to engage with brands. The need to move faster is greater now than it has ever been. Hence more and more brands around the world have been learning from social media and deploying real time digital and traditional media strategies.
During the recently concluded World Cup in Brazil, Google teamed up with Nike to generate eight different real time campaigns that allowed fans to celebrate, remix and share memorable sports moments, just seconds after they happened. As a result Nike got over two million fan interactions across 200 different countries.
The mechanism is speed plus participation. The content is designed to appear while emotion is still peaking. Fans are not just watching highlights later. They can react and reshape the moment immediately, then distribute it across their networks while the conversation is still alive.
That “seconds after it happened” detail is the whole point. It signals an operating model where creative, production, approvals, and publishing are built to run at match tempo.
In live-event marketing, real-time only matters when the operating model is built to publish at the same tempo as the audience’s emotion.
Sport is a live social experience. When something memorable happens, people do not only want to witness it. They want to respond. They want to signal allegiance, emotion, and identity. Giving fans remix and share tools turns that impulse into action, and action becomes interaction at scale.
It also changes how brand value shows up. Instead of interrupting the moment, the brand becomes part of how fans express the moment.
The business intent is simple: ride the peak of attention and convert it into participation. Real-time campaigns let Nike earn visibility through fan activity rather than purely through paid reach. They also make the brand feel culturally present. not days later, but right now.
They created eight real-time campaigns that let fans celebrate, remix, and share memorable moments seconds after they happened.
Because emotion peaks during the live moment. If fans can react instantly, they will share while attention is highest.
A system that can publish fast. creative templates, production readiness, approvals, and distribution must be designed for speed, not adapted on the day.
According to the campaign summary, it drove over two million fan interactions across 200 different countries.
If you want to win live moments, build repeatable remix formats and the operating model behind them, so your audience can act while the moment is still hot.
Last month, British Airways set up a first-of-its-kind interactive digital billboard in London’s Piccadilly Circus. It uses custom-built “surveillance technology” to track British Airways flights passing overhead.
On detecting a BA flight, the boy in the ad gets up and points to the plane. An accompanying message displays the flight number and the place it is arriving from.
In high-traffic city centres, digital out-of-home works best when it reacts to the environment rather than shouting at it.
Interactive advertisements are getting more popular with brands. In May, a Spanish organization called ANAR used lenticular printing to show different messages to kids and adults in their campaign for anti-child abuse.
The magic is simple. The screen stays “normal” until the exact moment a British Airways aircraft is in view. Then the creative switches to a scene that makes you do what the boy does. You look up, spot the plane, and connect the brand to the real object above you.
“Surveillance technology” sounds heavier than what’s happening in practice. In this execution, it is reported as hardware and software used to identify aircraft and match them to British Airways flights in real time. The storytelling trigger is the aircraft, not the crowd.
Definition you can reuse: Context-aware DOOH is outdoor creative that changes based on live signals from the environment (location, time, weather, movement, or public data feeds). It works when the signal is instantly understandable and the change earns attention rather than interrupts it.
Most outdoor advertising asks for attention first, and only then offers meaning. #lookup flips that order. It gives you meaning first. A child pointing at something real. Then it rewards your curiosity with an answer you cannot get from a static poster. What flight is that, and where has it come from?
This is the rare “brand moment” where the interface and the emotion line up. A real plane prompts real curiosity. The billboard supplies the missing information. The brand gets credited for the experience.
At one level, it’s a smart stunt. At a deeper level, it’s a reframing of air travel. Instead of selling price, routes, or amenities, it sells the feeling of possibility and the breadth of the network.
It also turns a passive medium into an earned-media engine. When a billboard reacts to reality, people record it, talk about it, and share it because it feels like “proof,” not persuasion.
It changes its creative in real time based on a live external trigger. A British Airways aircraft passing overhead. That trigger causes the billboard to play a scene and display flight details tied to the specific plane.
No. QR codes and touchscreens require deliberate user input. #lookup is environment-triggered interaction. The “input” is a real-world event, not a tap.
Because it turns a static message into a situated experience. When the content matches what is happening around you right now, attention feels earned and the brand feels more relevant.
Use a clean, reliable signal you can access easily (time of day, weather, local transit status) and design one dramatic creative switch that is instantly visible from a distance.
Overcomplication. If the trigger is rare, hard to understand, or the creative change is subtle, the concept will not land. Optimise for clarity and frequency of payoff.
