Walkers Put Gary Lineker in a Vending Machine

When Walkers Crisps wanted to promote their 'Do us a flavour' campaign they thought that, as well as the usual TV and poster routes, they'd put a famous former footballer in a vending machine attached to a bus stop on Europe's busiest shopping street... sort of.

Below, Ben Clark, the managing director of ACNE London, the production company behind the campaign, explains all.

What was the brief you got from AMV?

As part of the ‘Do us a flavour’ campaign AMV BBDO and Walkers wanted to take over bus stops and transform them into the first ever tweet-activated vending machines. The idea was to invite passers by to “Tweet to eat” and have the chance to get a free packet of crisps dispensed in real time.

Our brief from AMV was to help them with the whole project from start to finish. ACNE’s live-action director, Scott Weintrob, worked closely with ACNE's digital team to work out what variations we needed to shoot with Gary for the content on the screens. The team at ACNE planned out the variables and worked out exactly what we would need to shoot for the application to work correctly.

The digital department at ACNE were responsible for creating the front-end application of the interactive bus shelter. Working closely with the team at Clear Channel, who were in charge of the physical vending machine, the application responded to socket communication received from the machine to establish both the state of the application as well as displaying information to consumers on the street.

From this information, different video sequences of Gary Lineker were played at the right times and consumers were updated in real time with information about what to tweet so that they could receive their free pack of Walker's crisps. Scott Weintrob then shot the PR film [above] which summarises the whole experience.

What was the technology behind the vending machine?

The application was an Adobe AIR application that played video sequences and displayed UI content based on socket communication from an embedded application on the vending machine.

The embedded application was responsible for communication both with the physical vending machine, dispensing packets of crisps, as well as reading data from the Twitter streams. Acting as a socket server, communication was established between the embedded application and the front-end application, allowing for the consumer to engage with the shelter and receive feedback and responses in real-time.

How many different actions/reactions did you film with Lineker and how were they chosen?

There were a total of 25 different actions and reactions from Gary; along with Sonny and Milo the creative team behind the project, we went for the most engaging, accessible and interesting options. The goal was to get the public to enjoy and fully engage with the interactive experience.

What was the best/funniest reaction you got from the public?

People genuinely thought Gary was in the machine. Sonny, Milo and Scott really wanted the build to be big enough so that people genuinely thought that we’d put Gary in the vending machine. The reactions when Gary messaged people or asked them to move on were brilliant.

What was the hardest part of the project?

Aside from the obvious technical challenges of doing something that had never been done before, it was actually quite difficult to control the crowds that gathered on Oxford Street when we went live. Everyone wanted to get involved, which whilst hard to control, but actually a pretty good result.