Sodimac's Hijacked Highway campaign by McCann Lima used cardboard VR glasses on the Panamericana Sur to deliver 20+ home-improvement offers to passing drivers
Sodimac Hijacked Highway and Rewrote Outdoor Advertising in Peru
Sodimac's Hijacked Highway is a March 2017 experiential marketing campaign created by McCann Lima that distributed cardboard VR glasses to vehicle passengers traveling Peru's Panamericana Sur, allowing them to view a virtual catalogue of more than 20 real home-improvement offers through an immersive virtual reality experience placed along the country's main highway.
The campaign operates at the intersection of outdoor advertising and interactive technology. Rather than presenting static billboard creative, Sodimac replaced conventional roadside advertisements across a 15-kilometre stretch of the Panamericana Sur with a fully navigable VR catalogue of summer home-improvement products. Passengers received cardboard VR viewers, transforming what would otherwise be an unremarkable highway journey into a browsable, transactional brand experience. The activation earned a Clapboard Score of 70/100, reflecting its technical ambition, originality of medium, and demonstrable awards performance.
In Peru, where the Panamericana Sur connects Lima to the country's southern coastal resorts and carries heavy seasonal traffic, the campaign selected its geography with precision. The audience — families and consumers traveling during the summer season — represented exactly the demographic most likely to invest in home and garden improvements. By meeting that audience in transit, Sodimac converted idle commuter time into active product discovery, compressing the distance between inspiration and purchase intent in a single journey.
Sodimac identified a structural inefficiency in traditional outdoor advertising and built its entire strategic rationale around resolving it. Billboards along a highway demand split-second attention from passengers who have no way to act on what they see. The Hijacked Highway campaign inverted that limitation by handing passengers the catalogue itself, transforming passive exposure into extended, self-directed engagement.
The timing was deliberate. Launched in March 2017, the campaign aligned with Peru's late-summer period, when household spending on home and garden products typically intensifies and families use the Panamericana Sur to reach coastal destinations. Sodimac operated 26 stores in Peru by June 2017, including 14 locations outside Lima, giving the brand meaningful physical retail infrastructure to support any purchase intent generated along the route. According to Falabella Com Pe, Falabella described its combined Sodimac and Maestro home-improvement business as the formal-market leader in Peru at this time, with Falabella's Peruvian home-improvement sales reaching approximately US$812 million in 2017, as reported by scribd.com. That market position gave the campaign commercial weight beyond its creative novelty.
Peru's broader retail environment provided additional context. According to diyinternational.com, Peru's total retail sales averaged approximately US$61 billion in 2015 and 2016, a contraction from the US$64 billion recorded in 2013 and 2014. In a tightening retail market, brands competing for household spending had strong incentive to reach consumers at high-receptivity moments rather than through conventional advertising clutter. Hijacked Highway pursued precisely that logic, occupying a moment — the highway journey — that competing home-improvement advertisers had not yet claimed with comparable technological investment.
McCann Lima engineered a creative system that required physical distribution, VFX production, and spatial design to function simultaneously. The campaign's creative direction was led by Mauricio Fernández-Maldonado and Christian Caldwell, serving as Creative VPs, with Jomi Rivera and Pipo Galván as Creative Directors. Planning VP Juan Luis Arteaga, Production Director Alonso Palomino, and Digital Director Virginia Caceres rounded out the core leadership structure, supported by creatives Alvaro Soto, Gonzalo Paredes, Andrés Aranguren, and Luis Veliz.
On screen and in the physical environment, the execution unfolded in two simultaneous layers. As reported by adobomagazine.com, the activation gave travelers a new view of the road trip, with animated products appearing to interact directly with the highway itself — meaning the VR content was choreographed to respond to and overlay the actual roadside environment visible through the VR glasses. Passengers looking through their cardboard viewers would see Sodimac home-improvement products emerge from and interact with the landscape passing outside the car window, dissolving the boundary between the physical highway and the virtual catalogue. According to adsspot.me, the activation replaced more than 40 outdoor advertisements across the 15-kilometre corridor, meaning the creative takeover was comprehensive rather than incidental.
The production required VFX work sophisticated enough to register as coherent and spatially accurate through low-cost cardboard VR viewers — a constraint that demanded tight calibration of the virtual environment to real-world viewing conditions. The result was a campaign that used accessible, mass-distributable hardware to deliver an experience that would otherwise require dedicated VR hardware, extending the reach of immersive technology to an audience that had not opted into it.
Hijacked Highway earned multiple Bronze Lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2017. As reported by briefandbutter.com, the campaign won in the Direct Lions category and in the Entertainment Lions category. It also won a Bronze Lion in the Direct — Digital and Social: Use of Mobile category, as documented by briefandbutter.com. These awards represent three independent jury validations of the campaign's strategic and creative merit across distinct competitive fields at the most prominent global advertising award show.
As listed by adobomagazine.com, Hijacked Highway appeared among notable campaigns from the region during this period, cementing its standing as a benchmark for experiential work in the Latin American market. According to Little Black Book, the activation replaced other brands' billboards across a 15-kilometre stretch of the Panamericana Sur with an interactive catalogue that passengers could browse and act on during the journey — a scope of physical execution that underscores the campaign's ambition beyond a purely digital stunt.
No independently verified audience reach or sales conversion figures for Hijacked Highway are publicly available beyond the awards record and documented production scale. The structural effectiveness of the campaign, however, is legible in its design: a captive audience, a dwell time measured in minutes rather than seconds, and a catalogue format that reduced friction between product discovery and purchase intent. For a home-improvement retailer with 26 Peruvian stores at the time, converting highway traffic into qualified leads represented a commercially logical outcome, even without published conversion data to quantify it.
Hijacked Highway was a March 2017 experiential campaign by McCann Lima for Sodimac in Peru. It distributed cardboard VR glasses to passengers on the Panamericana Sur, letting them browse a virtual catalogue of more than 20 home-improvement offers while traveling along the country's main highway.
The activation ran along a 15-kilometre stretch of the Panamericana Sur, Peru's primary southern highway. The corridor connects Lima to coastal destinations and carries heavy seasonal traffic, giving Sodimac access to a large captive audience of families during the summer travel period.
Hijacked Highway won three Bronze Lions at the 2017 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, according to briefandbutter.com. The wins spanned the Direct Lions, Entertainment Lions, and the Direct — Digital and Social: Use of Mobile category, recognising the campaign across strategy, entertainment, and technology disciplines.
The campaign was led by Creative VPs Mauricio Fernández-Maldonado and Christian Caldwell, with Creative Directors Jomi Rivera and Pipo Galván. Planning VP Juan Luis Arteaga and Production Director Alonso Palomino also held senior roles, supported by a wider team of creatives and digital specialists at McCann Lima.
Passengers in vehicles on the Panamericana Sur received cardboard VR glasses, through which animated Sodimac home-improvement products appeared to interact with the highway environment outside the window. As reported by adobomagazine.com, the VR content was designed to overlay and engage with the real roadside landscape visible during the journey.
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