There is a move that goes the opposite way from a polished, finished ad. Deliberately leave it unfinished and show only the traces of someone walking out midway—and into that “absence,” whoever sees it pours a story of their own. In 2026, easyJet proved it with an “unfinished billboard.”
In June 2026, the budget airline easyJet ran a campaign called “Drop Everything.” Built around a new tool that lets you browse flights departing within 48 hours, it installed in London special billboards that looked less like ads and more like “crime scenes.” Tools scattered, scaffolding still up, only the workers gone. The setup: a passing tradesperson, seized by the impulse of this ad, threw down their work and ran to the airport. The copy: “Routine. Schmoutine. Drop Everything.”
Why it worked
Write “you can fly right now” in words and it gets skimmed past as a mere feature description. But easyJet placed only the moment those words came true—the trace of a person who lost to impulse and abandoned the site. People doubt when they are told, but fill in with imagination when they are shown a trace. “What kind of impulse would make someone drop their tools and start running?”—the viewer narrates it themselves. And the sense of a foreign object—an “abandoned construction site” slipped into the city—invited a double-take and a photo. It feels not like being shown an ad, but like witnessing an incident.
How a small business can use this
Try replacing the change you want to convey with “the trace left right after that change happened.” For hiring, instead of writing “a comfortable workplace,” show “the desk where someone came to the interview after tearing up their previous company’s job listing.” For a switching pitch, instead of saying “faster than the competition” with numbers, show “the site where someone kicked aside a stalled quote and switched over.” A trace of walking out speaks more eloquently than a finished ideal image. Especially in work whose unfinished middle stages are photogenic, this reversal works as is.
“At our worksite, what kind of ‘trace’ could tell the story?”—ASTER keeps a stock of reusable structures drawn from hundreds of cases, and translates them into your products and hiring challenges to turn them into concrete plans. Feel free to get in touch.
