How do you brand the imagination of young RAF fans with a digital experience when there's all the real-life drama of fighter jets and advanced airforce tech on show?

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That was the question M's digital chief Nick Clarke first put to me, after bringing me in to help his team devise and pitch 'something special' for the RAF's centenary.

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The answer had to be something most people hadn't seen before. This was in the early days of VR 2.0 and with my background in immersive storytelling and mixed reality, I was convinced a fully-immersive virtual reality experience would do the job.  

  
I Ied the agency creative team in devising and successfully pitching the experience concept. Then workshopped, scripted, storyboarded and guided the production of the 10-minute VR experience in collaboration with serving personnel across the RAF.

The final product: OP VR was one of the first branded 'true-VR' experiences. An interactive, first-person humanitarian mission –  it transported audiences to the edge of space and back, performing different RAF roles to save lives on the other side of the World. It captured the public's imagination at airshows across the country; reinforcing the RAF’s reputation for innovation on their centenary.

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We future-proofed the experience by strategically centring the story around personnel in 'hard-to-recruit' roles, ensuring OP VR could be used as a recruitment tool for years to come. 

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The agency won awards including a BOC Brilliance Award and a Drum Marketing Award. More importantly, we delivered thousands of hours of quality engagement for the RAF with a diverse, hard-to-reach youth audience.​​