Adverblog: The Schiphol experience

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September 12, 2007

The Schiphol experience

Dutch agency Achtung shows us again that they have great skills in creating 3D worlds. Their latest work is a website to explain and illustrate what happens in Schiphol, Amsterdam's airport.

Everything is in Dutch, but you don't have to speak the language to understand what's going on in the Schiphol world, do like kids do and just enjoy the great animations to find out its secrets. Learn how planes take off and land, discover how freights are managed and the potentials of the airport surrounding area.

The site is impressive. I must admit that at first I didn't understand the ultimate communication/marketing goal of such a project, but fortunately Dirk provided me with the key to appreciate it and realize it isn't just a nice aestetic exercise.

The whole point of putting online such a site moves around the fact that "Schiphol needs to grow to keep its current position of hub for Europe. Of course a lot of people in the direct surroundings doubt about the growth (for reasons like environment, sound pollution etc). So the site offers visitors the possibility to decide for themselves whether schiphol should grow or not. In each of the four topics (sound, airfreight, travelling and economics) visitors can pull or push the handle and see some the consequences of growth and what it means directly to them. So for example, if you don’t want Schiphol to grow in the holiday topic, prices of holidays increase and direct flights will reduce. The reality is of course much more complex but we think that this way people will at least get in touch with the topics and can participate in the discussion better."

By: martina // Permalink // Comment(s): (2)
Category(s): New websites, Social campaigns

Comments on this entry

Nice interface although the message is a bit simplistic I think. Growth = good. No growth = no good...

Posted by: Joep at September 14, 2007 01:38 PM

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Unfortunately it's not a clear view at all. It is a totally distorted view of the Schiphol Lobby. Like, the Polderbaan (landing strip) was build to have less flights on the Buitenvelderd baan (other landing strip). But now they claim that they can use the Buitenvelderdbaan more because it has unused capacity! Even worse, clear agreements were made about limits of growth. Schiphol breaks them time after time and gets away with it. At the moment, hunderds of thousands of people suffer from an ever growing Schiphol in the middle of a densely populated area. Schiphol does not need to grow, it can maintain it's current size without loss of jobs or money. It's a false argument.

Posted by: Piet Miller at September 17, 2007 08:06 PM

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