Creative impulse

Throughout June, P&O is promoting its range of winter cruises with a new pounds 500,000 press campaign featuring its recently launched luxury liner, the Oriana. The ads show the ship against a night sky with five globes, highlighting exotic destinations such as Hong Kong and Jerusalem, and bear the line: "Spend winter on another world."

The client: P&O Cruises Ltd.

Nigel Esdale, general marketing manager

The task was to raise awareness of our winter programme, which ranges from 10-day holidays to the Atlantic islands, to a complete circumnavigation of the globe. We were therefore contemplating the need to run two separate treatments, but APL came up with one that allowed us to advertise both types of holiday. The globes idea enabled us to be very specific as to which destinations are available, while also representing the whole world.

We also wanted to emphasise the pleasure of going on a cruise by making it other-worldly and outside the everyday experience of the individual. A full three-month world cruise is an aspirational thing, so we wanted to set that up as the ultimate holiday experience.

The agency: Ammirati Puris Lintas

Andrew Cracknell, chairman

You have to realise that there's an awful lot of travel advertising about, and it's not necessarily designed to make someone impulsively book a cruise. The main purpose of such ads is to get brochures into people's hands. After all, it's a big chunk of somebody's money, and we recognise that they will want to take time to think about it.

The ads draw attention to the scale, the enormity and the grandeur of a worldwide tour, especially on the Oriana. We feel it manages to be extremely laidback, but still noticeable: this isn't an area in which you can be loud, boorish and brash, so you have to make people sit up and take notice by being striking and elegant. We wanted an ad showing that a cruise really is "the experience of a lifetime", and we feel it conveys feelings of space, calm, peace and relaxation.

Advertising for cruises often tends to be nostalgic, with passengers in period costume - indeed, P&O has gone for that approach in the past - but the cruise market is changing and we wanted to reflect that. It is the fastest growing sector in the holiday market, and over the past few years it has built up a slightly broader base. We are targeting those who are already in the cruising market and also those who are further back in the decision- making process: those planning to go round the world when they retire, perhaps.

SCOTT HUGHES