BA almost used Virgin plane in TV ads
25.09.11
British Airways' new TV advert contained a shot of a rival Virgin Atlantic plane, the Mirror reports. It says that embarrassed bosses ordered an emergency edit of the 90-second ad – which uses state-of-the-art computer-generated images to plot the airline’s history – after a member of its staff spotted the blunder a day before its official launch.
A shot in the ad, centred around the company motto' To Fly. To Serve', shows a row of three British Airways Boeing 747s parked at a terminal. But the nearest plane displayed the serial code G-VGAL – the marking of a Virgin Atlantic aircraft based in Manchester !
The newspaper reports that digital experts had placed BA’s livery over the plane belonging to their competitor while making the ad and forgot to remove the Virgin jet’s unique code. The error was picked up by an eagle-eyed engineer when BA showed the ‘Aviator’ commercial to thousands of employees at a preview last Monday. Bosses immediately ordered advertising agency BBH, who filmed the ad, to erase the mistake. By the time it was unveiled to the press the following day and launched on TV on Wednesday, the Virgin code had been replaced.
A BA spokeswoman told the newspaper: ‘No version of the ad showed any aircraft in the livery of another airline. The ad is complex and richly detailed, and its production involved an extensive editing process. This process had not been completed by the time we needed to send preview DVDs to our workforce.’
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