• by Amy Corr , Staff Writer @MediaPostOTL, September 25, 2006

Pentax launched a campaign this month in the form of a commuter train wrap in Portland, Ore. with glowing effects. The train was covered with GlowSkin, an electro-luminescent wrap that sends a programmable, low-power signal through thin lamps, allowing sequential and animated illumination.

What does this all mean? One second you see a group of rock climbers scaling a wall and the next minute the handholds light up progressively in front of the climbers. It doesn't stop there. Then the individual words, "Live," "The," "Active," and "Life," light up, and before the cycle repeats, "Pentax K100D" and an image of the camera will flash.

This marks the first time that GlowSkin was used in a U.S. campaign. The technology has been implemented in campaigns on billboards and buses in Asia and Belgium. The lighting can be animated (lots of lights at once), static, or sequential (in an ordered fashion).

"This was the ideal companion for those living an active lifestyle," said Leah Steig, media strategy director at Hunt Adkins, the agency behind both the creative and media executions.

Train wraps have been used before in Portland, but never with glow-in-the-dark creative.

Steig expected the biggest hurdle of the campaign to be getting the Portland Transit Authority to approve the wrap, but creative was swiftly approved.

The challenge, however, for this month-long campaign was implementing it in such a short period of time.

The agency "crammed a two-month project into 10 days," said Steig. "Glowskin produced the [lighted] product in China and then sent creative to the U.S."

One thing that was on the agency's side was cost. Since GlowSkin has never been used in a U.S. campaign before, there was no real pricing structure for the product, ensuring the agency didn't blow its entire budget on one glowing train wrap.

Trains were also wrapped in Minneapolis (minus the illumination) and trolleys were wrapped in Boston. All in all, the glowing train expects to garner 20 million impressions.

The campaign also includes billboards and print ads, running through December in magazines including Popular Science, Men's Health, Bicycling Magazine, Outside, Elle, Wired, Shape, Domino, Popular Photography, PC Photo, Self, Rolling Stone, Real Simple and Surfer Magazine.

Creative features a person in motion, such as a toddler or a mountain biker, with adjoining copy such as "Focus Speed Vs Toddler Speed" and "The Road Less Traveled Isn't A Road At All."

And just in case you were wondering, the commuters can't see the flashing effect from inside the car.