shots Awards 2016: Best Use of Outdoor - Digital

The iconic Field Trip to Mars campaign for advanced technology manufacturers Lockheed Martin transformed the way in which the industry looked at VR, bringing collective virtual experiences to schoolchildren and challenging the way in which it has traditionally been worn, as it was rolled out without a headset.

McCann New York's group creative director Josh Grossberg speaks to shots about creating the out-of-this-world experience for Lockheed Martin, Field Trip to Mars, which won gold at the 2016 shots Award in Best Use of Outdoor - Digital.

shots Awards 2016: Best Use of Outdoor - Digital

Gold Winner: Lockheed Martin Field Trip to Mars

What was the brief with which Lockheed Martin approached you? 

That’s not a simple question. We have a larger brand-level brief, which is'how do we help people understand that Lockheed Martin is one of the most innovative technology companies in the world?' In pursuing that, we had been itching to talk about space - after all, Lockheed Martin has been a part of nearly every American mission to deep space ever. And if Hollywood and pop culture are any indication, everybody loves talking about space.

When the time was right, we were given a slightly more tactical brief to help Lockheed Martin reclaim their leadership in space, and particularly deep space. One of the downsides of a legacy like Lockheed Martin’s is that people start to take what you do for granted. As sexy, new names were popping up in the business of commercial space, Lockheed Martin was getting drowned out, despite having already built the spacecraft that will take the first people to Mars. It was our job to start to reverse that trend and re-establish LM’s bona fides.

Lockheed Martin launched this campaign as a way of exploring the possibilities of VR as a group experience. At what stage did you decide that a school bus would be the best vehicle to present this new tech?

The campaign was actually launched to help inspire the generation of kids who will travel to Mars. We wanted to make sure they were prepared for life when Lockheed Martin technology (like Orion) enabled humanity to exist on more than just one planet. We wanted to motivate them to learn the skills they would need to do the jobs required to help us all to go further than ever before. That’s where the name of the campaign came from; Generation Beyond.

Originally, we were going to create the group VR experience on a train. But once we really honed in on the kids as the core audience for our message, we realized that nothing would be more suitable than a school bus.

Why did you think that a group of school children would be the best audience for this experiment?

Choosing school children wasn’t really a decision so much as an outgrowth of the larger campaign. There were probably millions of ways to help people understand that Lockheed Martin is making deep space travel a reality in the very near future. Talking directly to the people who will be part of it was the one we chose.

How challenging was it to realise the technical aspect of the campaign? 

Before we ever started on the bus, we knew that being the second people to do this would have been a lot easier. But being first was exactly what made it so interesting.

That said, none of us expected quite so many technical challenges to arise. It felt like there was a new one each day. There were three main challenges:

1) How to turn the windows into displays. That was an extreme technical challenge, ultimately solved by customising prototype monitors. We also had to reconfigure the inside of the bus slightly to hide the extra width they created.

2) How to create the landscape of Mars in VR. VR is normally built for a headset. This was an entirely new way of picturing the landscape and it had to work for the people at the front of the bus differently from the people at the back. And it had to move and react as the bus did. We had to make sure we didn't configure the Martian landscape so that we’d end up turning into a mountain when we made the corresponding turn in the real world.  

3) How to track the motion of the bus in the real world so that it replicated exactly in the virtual/Martian one. VR sickness results when your eyes and your body experience things differently (kind of like seasickness). We needed our virtual world to react in real time to every little turn, bump and jostle. The basic sensors we’d anticipated using (GPS, accelerometer) weren’t accurate enough for that. So we had to create something better. Hint- it involved an industrial timing laser.

There were countless other, more typical obstacles too, involving insuring a school bus, regulations about what colour it could be, permits to drive it when no government official even understands what it is, etc.

What does it mean to you to win a shots Award?

We’ve been so overwhelmed with the recognition we’ve been given for this project. It’s well more than we expected when we started.

That said, shots has such a discerning commitment to finding the best of the best in advertising and casts such a wide net globally that it’s really quite flattering that they would consider Field Trip to Mars as meeting their standards.

When you look at who the other winners are this year, it’s an honour to be included among them and a real testament to the courage and ambition of our client and all of the hard work that many, many people put into this project.