When you’re truly enjoying yourself at a music festival, it’s all but guaranteed that at some point you’ll get separated from your friends. So to make it easier to find them again, Pepsi made an app-connected blimp that helps guide lost and lonely revellers back to their pals.
Created by UK ad agency AMV BBDO, the half-blimp-half-drone was first deployed at London’s New Look Wireless Festival where attendees could download a free smartphone app and use it to request a little help in tracking down their friends amongst the giant mob of people.
Using a pixelated display that wrapped almost all the way around the floating sphere, the blimp would provide visual cues as to which direction someone needed to head in order to find who they were looking for — or they could simply follow it as it floated above the crowd.
It’s a publicity stunt, no question there, but also not a terrible idea. How often have you struggled to find where your friends are sitting in a darkened movie theatre? An overhead drone could definitely help there. Or when you’re trying to find a specific store at a shopping mall., instead of trying to decipher some complicated map, you could simply follow a drone to your destination. Pepsi, you might be on to something here.
[YouTube via Taxi via Ads of the World]