Icon brings Aviva’s ‘Big Picture’ campaign to life with MEI

Icon:MEI, the event production arm of branding specialists Icon, has been instrumental in the design and implementation of Aviva’s ‘The Big Picture’ campaign. This innovative, global campaign has involved wrapping and projecting a selection of customers’ images onto major buildings in cities around the world.

Richard Dale, Director of Icon:MEI explains more; “We were involved with this project from its inception. Identifying suitable sites was the first step, followed by complex, and in many cases protracted, negotiations with building owners, occupiers and planning authorities in each of the cities. Having successfully completed this, the physical design and implementation of each of the installations was relatively straight forward. However the unpredictable weather, not least in London, did provide additional challenges for our technical installation teams.” He continues; “The varying construction materials used in each of the buildings meant we had to utilise a range of different solutions to achieve a coherent appearance for the campaign. Methods used include one-way vision, brick vinyl and standard PVC wrap and the biggest technical challenge was presented by Sea Containers House in London.” The total amount of self-adhesive vinyl used in the worldwide project, amounts to over 12,000² m.

Throughout the project the company worked closely with its client Not Actual Size to ensure that the core message and key elements of the Aviva brand and campaign were epitomised in the final installations. The global sites included London, Paris, Singapore and Warsaw, and the buildings that were wrapped include The National Theatre in London, CNIT in Paris and Hotel Intercontinental in Warsaw.

A second phase of the campaign ran for a week in London, when visitors were able to have their image projected live on to The National Theatre building on the South Bank. A webcam recording of the personalised image being projected onto the building was then sent direct to the individuals’ computer as a memento of the experience. Icon:MEI arranged the installation and projection facilities for this element of the campaign and designed the software to enable the storage and transmission of the numerous pictures that were generated during the week. “Each hour we projected 360 images, and the London installation ran for 5 hours each night so in total approximately 12,600 images were projected and captured by the system,” added Richard Dale.

Video footage of the installations can be seen at: www.icon-world.com/content/aviva-you-are-big-picture and on You Tube.