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Big, Bold, and Brilliant: How Customer Experience Is Transforming Media Strategy
25 Jun 2025
At the 2024 DMA Awards, British Airways’ OOH Big Little Welcomes campaign took home Gold in the Media Strategy category. Beyond trophies, this campaign sparked a bigger conversation about talent, audience empathy, and proving business impact.
In a recent DMA Media Council meeting, Uncommon Creative Partner Ben Golik joined the group and explored how this work didn’t just tick the DMA Awards’ timeless criteria—Strategy, Creativity, Results—but embodied the Council’s current strategic focus:
- Talent – showing the craft and collaboration behind First Class personalised media experiences
- Audience First – putting real people, not segments, at the centre
- Measuring Business Impact – proving that meaningful media moves more than metrics
The campaign showed that when creative, media, and customer experience teams unite, media strategy can transcend channels, shifting perceptions of a brand and of media strategy itself. In the age of data-driven marketing, British Airways’ festive out-of-home campaign offers a timely reminder: customer experience isn't a department, nor is it solely informative service messaging — what it can be is a creative opportunity.
Marketing that Moves People, Literally
The group explored how Big Little Welcomes turned typical Christmas travel into something far more emotional: a platform for personalised reunions. Instead of a traditional brand film or generic billboard, British Airways reimagined out-of-home media by handing it over, quite literally, to customers. Loved ones submitted heartfelt welcome messages via mobile, which were then displayed across 100+ digital sites in Heathrow Terminal 5.
This wasn't just a tear-jerker. It was a media-first, creatively led, data-sensitive operation that combined live flight data, geolocation, and volunteered user input.
“Even people whose names weren’t on the boards felt the warmth of the messages. It changed the tone of the terminal.”– Ben Golik, Uncommon Creative Studio
Where Media Meets Emotion
At its core, the campaign made out-of-home feel intimate, rare in a medium known for its broad reach. The success hinged on voluntary data, not intrusive targeting. Participants opted in via a mobile platform, selecting fonts or uploading handwriting to create deeply personal messages. With smart backend logistics, BA ensured 98% of messages were seen by the intended recipients.
Crucially, this was never just about the screens. BA extended the campaign beyond the terminal—onto motorways, taxi ranks, and even building projections on passengers’ homes.
Talent, Trust, and Tight Teams
The campaign's magic wasn’t just in the messaging. It was in the orchestration. Delivering real-time creative to hundreds of placements required not just cross-functional collaboration, but genuine operational trust between the brand, media, and creative teams.
BA, MG OMD, and Uncommon had spent years developing this rhythm, which was crucial for what was essentially a customer experience brief disguised as a media plan.
“This only worked because we’d already built the trust and muscle memory across teams. That made the leap possible.”– Ben Golik, Uncommon Creative Studio
Audience-First, Outcome-Focused
The Media Council reflected on how “Big Little Welcomes” captures a shift many marketers are feeling: from impressions to impact. From clever targeting to meaningful connection. From just measuring brand lift to owning a category moment. The 2023 campaign drove a 20-point uplift in brand preference and even de-commercialised an entire airport for ten days.
“Unique approaches to OOH in data-driven ways, to reach people in meaningful ways, that also has lasting memorable impact is how we start to connect with audiences. This campaign delivered on that and has the results to show for it.”– Visha Kudhail, Chair, DMA Media Council
What’s next?
This conversation came back to a central truth: good media strategy starts with audience empathy. Whether through talent, tooling, or team structure, brands must find ways to fuse creative intent with operational precision.
The DMA Media Council spotlights these approaches, not just to award them, but to embed them. As marketers, our opportunity is to make campaigns like Big Little Welcomes the rule, not the exception.
If your work is already going further, get ready for the DMA Awards opening on Monday 30th June.
Keen to join the conversation? Apply to the DMA Media Council here.
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