Hijacked highway - Sodimac | Clapboard Ad Archive

Hijacked Highway from Sodimac and McCann Lima in 2017 represents one of the most direct and technologically forward creative acts in the Peruvian house and garden retail sector, intercepting the conventional highway advertising landscape with a disruptive VR demonstration that redefined what a roadside campaign could do for brand engagement. The campaign took full advantage of the Panamericana Sur, Peru’s most heavily trafficked highway, converting passive billboards into an interactive trigger for an immersive experience: passengers along the route were equipped with VR cardboard glasses, transforming their car ride into a virtual shopping journey. Through the glasses, commuters accessed a hyper-real catalogue of more than 20 tangible home improvement offers, mapped digitally onto their real-time drive and thus collapsing the distance between product discovery and lived environment. By focusing on the immediate, tactile demonstration of the Sodimac offer — eschewing narrative, celebrity, or symbolism for a pure product-in-action approach — the activation aligns squarely with what Clapboard’s taxonomy recognizes as FORMAT#1—Demonstration, a format predicated on showing, rather than telling, the value exchange at stake. The strategy is grounded in pragmatic and cultural insight: harnessing the downtime of vehicle passengers to surprise and involve them, interrupting boredom or habitual ad blindness with a memorable utility that enhances the roadside experience while delivering a shock of the new via accessible VR. This move signaled Sodimac’s ambition to transcend traditional retail points and meet modern consumers on their terms, amplifying accessibility and convenience while laying claim to early adopter territory in a market where digital engagement and experiential tech were still gathering momentum. As VR proliferated in entertainment but remained a novelty in retail, Sodimac and McCann Lima leveraged the medium’s inherent attention-grabbing effect to assert the brand’s category leadership and technological savvy alongside market rivals architecting more conventional, channel-driven differentiation. The campaign’s lift is measured in its visibility and the lasting impression it created among a sizable, captive audience accustomed to static roadside messaging. Clapboard rates this 70/100. Hijacked Highway matters as a signal of how category disruptors can repurpose physical infrastructure for digital-first brand storytelling when market saturation demands new kinds of experiential cut-through.