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Thursday 29th May 2008 - Artesian skydiving veteran Andy Pook made history today by jumping from a plane at 14,000 feet as part of a live broadcast on Channel 4 of a jump which took place in Madrid.

‘Pooky’ as he is know to his friends and colleagues is the current captain of the British Skydiving team and was one of 18 other skydivers who took the challenge to take the plunge as part of the Honda PR stunt.

“This is live, at 14,000 feet, over Spain,” a man shouted over the roar of the wind, as he and a group of fellow skydivers plunged toward the earth near Madrid. Before deploying their parachutes, they created human formations spelling out the letters H, O, N, D and A.

The jump was broadcast live on Channel 4 in Britain on Thursday 29th May, during a three-minute commercial break from a reality television program.

Live TV advertisements have been making a comeback in the United States, as detailed recently by Stuart Elliott in the International Herald Tribune. But Honda, the Japanese automaker, has gone to greater lengths with its skydiving stunt in Britain. Instead of a pair of comedians in a TV studio reading jokes from a script, the ad involved 18 skydivers jumping from planes flown in formation and only 60 seconds of freefall to complete the sequence. Anything less than all five letters would have been regarded as a failure.

Honda and its ad agency in Britain, Wieden + Kennedy, developed the idea to illustrate the tag line “Difficult is worth doing”, which is being used to promote a new version of the Accord. It is the latest in a series of high-concept spots for the British unit of the automaker.

The first of those ads, in 2003 called ‘Cog’, featured dozens of actual car parts arranged in a dominolike sequence; the parts seemed to take on a life of their own after a rolling cog set the chain reaction in motion. The follow-up, an animated spot that introduced a new diesel engine in 2004, featured the American humorist Garrison Keillor singing a jingle with the chorus, “Hate something, change something, make something better.”

The live ad, meanwhile, created a number of difficulties for Honda, Wieden + Kennedy, Channel 4 and Starcom, the media buying agency for the automaker. They had to ensure that the skydivers had sufficient practice and that the two planes involved took off at the right time to arrive at altitude at 8:10. The spot also required a dispensation from the British advertising regulator, which typically previews all television advertising. The organization saw only a script and had to trust Honda, Channel4 and the skydivers to not do anything ‘inappropriate’ before the watershed.

And then there was the question of the weather, which could have required the jump to be called off at the last minute. As it was, the visibility was mostly good when the commercial break began at 8:10 p.m. The thin layer of cloud when they were building the ‘D’ certainly gave the impression of speed!

See the ad here

http://www.honda.co.uk/accord/

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