Hacking Instagram - CMAX LIVE (Interactive OOH)
What happens when you harness the power of real people to do something awesome?
In May, we rolled out a project that marries traditional and social media in a totally new way: C-MAX Live. The idea was to use out-of-home ad boards and Instagram to create an animation from real people’s snapshots. In ten cities across America, the boards invite users to step into single frames from a custom-designed C-MAX animation.
When real people take their photo with the board and upload it to Instagram tagged #cmax, amazing things start to happen. Through image recognition, the pictures get stitched together in the right order to form the animation. Then, people are directed to cmaxlive.com to search for themselves by logging into Instagram. Once there, they can also search for their friends and watch the entire animation populated by a cast of ever-changing people.
How did C-MAX Live get started? You may recognize the subject of the animation—La Linea—from cartoons run in the 1970s on the show The Great Space Coaster, and more recently, the Ford C-MAX TV spots. Working with the Italian animation team and Shilo, the Ford Social team created a short animation featuring this fun line-drawn character interacting with the audience. From there, individual frames were pulled out and converted to ad boards specially placed and designed for easy participation.
With 68 individual frames, we put the boards in the top 10 C-MAX markets across the country in malls, movie theaters, wild postings and events—anywhere people might be up for a little fun with their phone and a friend.