10.4M impressions from a billboard that knew how hot it was

One PSD. Nine venues. Two weeks.

McDonald's Qatar launched two new Sprite mixes for the summer: Passionfruit mixed with Sprite, and Watermelon mixed with Sprite. The plan was a full out-of-home takeover across Doha, nine venues, both languages, on every screen format the city runs.

The brand handed us one thing to start from. A single layered PSD. Everything that happened next, the motion, the live data and the build, was ours.

Make Doha's heat the media

In a Qatar summer, the most honest thing a cold drink can do is admit how hot it is outside. So we let the ad say the temperature out loud.

The creative reads the real feels-like temperature, turns it into a live "Thirst Score," and then cuts it to zero. Forty-five degrees of heat, dropped to FEELS LIKE 0°C, straight into the ice-cold Sprite mix.

The number on the Arabic board is read from the live feed, not baked into the artwork, so it moves with the city. The same board was photographed twice, at 45° and at 42°.

From a flat PSD to a living creative

We pulled every layer out of the file: fruit cutouts, ice, sparkles, type, mascots, and rebuilt the whole thing as animated HTML. No exported video files, no per-frame baking. Just code that plays frame-perfect on whatever screen the city throws at it, in English and Arabic.

The creative is not a video of the idea. It is the idea, running live.

Each panel runs the same five-beat story, and the first three beats are filled in by the weather, the moment it loads.

Temperature. The real air temperature in that venue, right now.
Feels like. The real-feel number, the one your skin actually believes.
Thirst Score. How thirsty Doha is at this exact minute, scored live from the heat.
Feels like 0°C. The cool turn. The whole screen drops to ice.
The Mixperience. Passionfruit and Watermelon Sprite, the reveal you were thirsty for.

A small piece of software behind every screen

The live part is quiet by design. A Cloudflare Worker wakes up on a schedule, reads the weather for every venue, computes the Thirst Score, and writes it all into one tiny cached file. The creatives just read that file when they load.

So the screens never wait on an API, the data never goes stale mid-loop, and every panel across the city shows the same live number at the same time.

On a schedule (the data layer): a weather API gives live feels-like temperature for all 9 venues. A Cloudflare Worker runs on a cron timer, computes the Thirst Score and writes the latest numbers to weather.json, one small cached file served from the edge.
On every render (the screen): each DOOH panel, each time the loop plays, checks the current temperature on load, reads weather.json for that exact venue, shows the right number live on screen, and checks again on the next render.

How Thirst gets scored, inside the Worker:

Thirst Score = clamp( ( feels-like − 25 ) / 30 × 100 , 0 , 100 )

Thirst Score = clamp( ( feels-like − 25 ) / 30 × 100 , 0 , 100 )

Thirst Score = clamp( ( feels-like − 25 ) / 30 × 100 , 0 , 100 )

If the network ever blinks, each screen falls back to a short local copy and a baked-in number, so the panel never goes blank.

9 Doha venues, end to end
18 creatives, 9 sizes × 2 languages
2 languages, English and Arabic
LIVE temperature, refreshed through the run

One PSD in. A weather-reactive campaign across the city out.

One master design. Every screen the city runs.

Roadside LED, mall portrait panels, vertical poles, ultrawide screens. Same master design, adapted cleanly to every ratio, in both languages, with the live layer wired into all of them.

The unlock was never one good frame. It was building the creative and the software as a single thing, so what used to take a studio weeks shipped from one platform in days.

The same master, mirrored for Arabic

The Arabic boards are not separate artwork. The composition mirrors, so the logo and the payoff move to the side an Arabic reader starts and finishes on. The photography does not flip. The type is reset in the Arabic face from the brand kit at a higher line height, and the safe zones are recalculated for the mirrored layout. That is the difference between localising an ad and translating one, and it is covered step by step in RTL ad localisation.

How it was made

Weather trigger. A live feed reads the real temperature in Doha and resolves it to a band, so the board knows whether the city is warm, hot or brutal right now.
Creative variant. Each band maps to a variant derived from the one approved master, in both languages. The temperature reading is composited into the frame rather than sitting in an overlay.
Nine screens. The resolved creative is pushed to the nine-screen ELAN Media network across the city, refreshing as the reading changes through the day.

10.4M impressions
5.6M video views
9 live screens
EN + AR from one master

The production method behind it is the same one used for catalogue campaigns: one approved master, a locked brand kit, and every output recomposed rather than cropped. See Arabic and RTL ad creative at scale, creative automation, or the 530-variant retail case study.

Great advertising starts with knowing the moment

ElarisLabs is the AI-native creative operating system for brands. Mixperience is what happens when the design and the software are built together, so a campaign can react to the real world while it is live.

Built with ElarisLabs. In partnership with ELAN Media. For McDonald's Qatar.