Beautifully shot and artfully restrained, British Airways’ ‘Reflections’ campaign risks being too tasteful for its own good, argues Mark Ritson.
British Airways’ new outdoor campaign, Reflections, is a masterclass in tasteful restraint.
Perhaps too much so.
Across billboards in London, Manchester and Edinburgh, passersby are met with sweeping aerial imagery: the world as seen through an aircraft window.
Each image, shot by one of four British photographers, evokes that moment just as the plane breaks through the clouds – a subtle shimmer of light across English countryside, the familiar bend of the Thames.
No planes, no copy, no explicit logo, just the faintest glint of sunlight showing British Airways’ ribbon reflected fleetingly in glass.
Nils Leonard, co-founder of Uncommon, the agency behind the ads, frames them as an attempt to capture “that universal, relatable moment of wonder when looking out of an aircraft window – a glimpse of light and color that becomes your first experience of something original.”
Calum Laming, British Airways’ chief customer officer, echoed that sentiment, calling the work “a celebration of the wonder of travel” and a “tribute to every passenger’s personal moment of reflection.”
But in terms of distinctiveness, do these ads play too clever a game?
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Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of code play. I totally accept that when a well-worn brand code is abstracted, twisted or made incomplete, the cognitive challenge of joining the semiotic dots often leads consumers to higher levels of engagement and branded recall. Last year’s ‘Windows’ campaign, with its partial logo, was a brilliant example of that.
The ‘Windows’ ads from 2024
But the new Reflections campaign plays too much, abstracts too far and challenges consumers too strongly.
The result is incredibly unbranded advertising. Sure, if you squint long enough at the images you can kind of recognize it’s British Airways. But you are getting way more cognitive help than the average punter.
I’ve already told you it’s a BA ad, told you where to look, and given you as much time as you need to work it out. In the wild, a consumer sitting on a bus is going to dwell on these beautiful photos for two seconds with little to no clue what they’re looking at, other than ‘London’ or ‘desert’ or ‘landscape.’
There’s no aircraft tailfin, no British flag hues, not even the famous ‘speedmarque’ in clearly visible form. It is exquisitely unbranded. A casual consumer rushing through Euston or across Edinburgh’s Royal Mile could easily mistake these ads for a Condé Nast feature or a Nikon promotion. BA and Uncommon seem to believe that absence equals confidence and reflection. In practice, it equates to invisibility and waste.
One of the new Reflections ads in situ
The next problem is emotion, or rather the lack of it.
These are technically exquisite photographs, but emotionally sterile. I absolutely appreciate the skill involved in getting such amazing shots of stuff from 30,000 feet. But there’s no human presence, no warmth, no story arc – just calm skies, geometric clouds and static things below. Research shows that emotion provokes feeling, which pulls uncaring punters into your ad and allows an intended message to strike home. All too often, marketers translate the serious business of brand management and the aesthetic ponce of creative direction into flat, sterile, empty advertising.
Orlando Wood has been banging on about this for years: about how brand building works better with “right-brain advertising” featuring characters, depth and messy interactions. Despite this fact, advertising is becoming ever more “left brain” with increasingly abstract, static images that look lovely and clean but move no one.
Again, we could point to the earlier Windows campaign from British Airways as a superior example of how humanity and a hint of storyline work much better. I’m not saying a woman peering out of a window is Tolstoy. I am saying it’s a lot more emotional, engaging and effective than the flat photos of Manhattan we are now being served with the new Reflections campaign.
Finally, there’s the strategic sin of impatience.
British Airways, like most brands, is in too much of a hurry. It has taken the Windows campaign off my table far too early and has served me a crapper, undercooked dish in Reflections.
BA created Windows 18 months ago.
It was a splendid campaign with plenty of miles left in the fuel tank. Maybe it eventually needed some different faces? Maybe not. Some new outdoor sites? A Christmas special with Santa looking out? The England team on their way to America for the World Cup?
Basically more of the same.
For years.
Not months.
Long-running familiarity would have bred greater recall and improved impact. Most existing ads aren’t just better than the ones that replace them; they generally get even more superior over time as consumers get their head around them. The only people who tire of advertising so quickly are marketers and agencies. The former because making ads is pretty much all most of them do in the One P Universe they now inhabit. The latter is because creative agencies don’t get paid for suggesting last year’s campaign was such a cracker that it should continue “as is.”
Uncommon’s biggest competitor for the British Airways business isn’t Droga5 or DDB. It’s prior excellence and a growing realization that the metabolism of creative replacement is way too fast.
Enduring advertising campaigns work precisely because they have time to embed their codes and build mental structures in the collective consciousness. The work marketers are tired of inside the boardroom is often the very stuff that consumers are just learning to recall at speed and attach slivers of meaning to. The industry forgets that we look at our ads in isolation, for hundreds of hours, weeks on end, and get sick of them very quickly as a result. And the consumers we target do the exact opposite.
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Of course, there’s one big caveat in all of this. This is my personal take on the new campaign and therefore just a big old pile of subjective bollocks. But I’ll bet you I’m right.
In fact, I’ll bet you four things.
I bet that Reflections will test poorly for short-term effectiveness because its abstract, uncoded format will propel its branded recall scores to all-time lows.
I’ll bet that the flat, emotionless landscapes on display ensure that these ads test very poorly for longer-term brand building.
I’ll bet that last year’s Windows campaign tests way better than this year’s Reflections on current consumers. Compared side by side, there can be only one winner.
And finally, I’ll bet that BA in 12 months’ time will wonder where all the momentum went. It’ll commission research, hold workshops, and brief a new campaign. And the cycle will continue.
Unless, of course, someone remembers that the best advertising isn’t the cleverest or the newest – it’s the stuff that people recognize, feel something about, and remember long enough to buy a bloody ticket.
Windows, in other words.
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