GREAT WAR JOURNEYS

The brief was to come up with an advertising campaign that would run through the spring of 2012 in the UK, to attract new visitors to the First World War regions in northern France and Belgium. The aim was to keep the balance between a ‘war tour’ and a normal modern family holiday.

I worked as the creative lead on this project, closely with the account director, media buying and digital development teams.

I came up with a simple concept, where the war appears to ‘rip across’ the landscape. We achieved this by using contemporary colour images shot to closely match archive images from the First World War. As you can imagine, this was quite a tall order for the local photographers, but they took to the brief with a lot of enthusiasm and got us the shots from the actual locations.

The print advertising campaign has appeared in BBC History and Who Do You Think You Are? magazines, the National Theatre programme for War Horse, and in large format at the channel ports, tube stations and national rail stations in the south east.

The digital campaign involved online advertising, html emailers and an extensive website full of useful information for tourists planning trips to the region.