UTC crafts'One Powerful Idea' to showcase its elevators

United Technologies Corporation, which is a pioneer in industries like aviation (helicopter), air-conditioning, elevators, etc., is widely recognised in the OOH space for its gigantic OOH innovations. The company has now rolled out its'One Powerful Idea' campaign to create awareness about the parent company UTC. The outdoor innovative trend started with S-76D from Sikorsky helicopter innovation and now it has introduced a mammoth moving elevators. The campaign has been executed at the Mahim Causeway for a longer duration. The OOH duties of the campaign have been handled by Milestone Brandcom.

The brand planned the second campaign because of the overwhelming response received for its helicopter innovation. People would stop or slow down at the location to see the innovation and many advertising clients apparently called up the brand team to ask about the innovations. Also cab drivers started recognising that spot with the innovation instead of location name. "I am happy to know that the campaign got phenomenal acknowledgement. It is difficult to do assess the ROI in an empirical way in out of home. The intent was to create awareness and brand recall and it certainly happened. As a medium, the power of OOH is targets a much larger audience set and is not restricted just to your core audience” said Goldie Srivastava, Director-Communications (India), United Technologies Corporation.

The new elevators innovation has been designed to ensure that they look identical to the real elevators. The idea was to stimulate the whole elevator experience as much possible without actually using the real elevator technology; therefore, similar principles of real elevators were applied to create the motion in the innovation. The dynamic 3 elevators structures have been moving in vertical directions. The innovations have been given a real look by placing a similar kind of control panels, metal sheets, buttons, mirrors, sliding doors, etc. It took two months of duration to design the entire structure. 

"The campaign brief was to create a strong brand image and showcase the strength of the product while building on their tagline'One Powerful Idea' at the same time. With this campaign, United Technologies aims to demonstrate how an idea with the right technology can completely transform human lives.  The elevator is a culmination of the best technology and the smartest minds in the country. The campaign to support this invention had to be nothing short of spectacular. This campaign proves that there are absolutely no limits when you have a great product to play around with. Numerous positive responses from the audience and industry have come, enquiring about the installation,” said Nabendu Bhattacharyya, CEO & Managing Director, Milestone Brandcom.

While conceptualising any OOH campaign, the brand follows two principles -- primarily the campaign should be extremely strategic and second, it should create something extraordinary. "When we looked at OOH as a medium, we clearly said that this is the medium we believe we can do dramatically different. We always had the option of putting vanilla billboards at random junction but that doesn't work for our audience. One objective was to make the medium our own and do something very different and other objective was to tell a story that captivates the imagination,” explained Srivastava.

There were multiple challenges faced during the execution part of the innovation. Primarily the biggest challenge was that anything of this scale hasn't been done in the country ever before. Therefore, on papers and 3D drawings, it looked like a great idea. But when the project had to actually start, even the biggest fabricators in Mumbai had never done anything like this.  Another issue was the brand wanted to emulate the real time elevator behaviour but without using the same technology. So a different technology was used that suited the OOH environment. Lastly, the fabrication started happening towards end of monsoon in the open very close to the bay with humidity, wind, bird movement, gusty winds -- but typically elevators don't have to face all this.

The brand has the plans to execute big level innovations at other places as well. However, there are different inherent challenges in different cities of things which can be done and can't be done including authority rules and resources. "We are trying to work within the challenges. The idea is to get the spot which is highly strategically placed and then create something of great visibility,” added Srivastava.

He said that a great idea comes from good teamwork. "There were 3-4 agencies included in this; certainly Milestone Brandcom has played a critical role but also Starcom India has done an excellent job. Even the creative agency Leo Burnett played a very big role. Even I would also like to give credit to fabricators for taking up this challenge and they delivered on time,” summed up Srivastava.