Skydive Dubai is THE provider of adrenaline-fuelled experiences in Dubai. Even so, they do compete with other adrenaline focused brands in the region. So, when they want to do something to encourage people to come jump out of a plane above the Palm it needs to stand out from the clutter. The brief was simple - 'Do something cool to celebrate our 13th birthday, make sure it's death defying and make sure it is seen by millions'. Our objective was to come up with an idea that would be relevant to their birthday, relevant to the death defying nature of the brand and have a little fun along the way.

Given Dubai is a place known globally for memorable stunts, we needed to come up with a different idea for Skydive Dubai's 13th Birthday. Something that not only would catch the attention of passers by, but also would become viral in the region. A death-defying BASE jump, in contrast with colourful and "harmless" cake and balloons theme, gave us the perfect idea, which is seamlessly connected to the brand.

Our message had to break the boundaries of our regular audience: people already interested in Skydiving and other adrenaline-fuelled sports. Our strategy was to create a stunt interesting enough for people who may never have thought of having an extreme experience, but after seeing it, they could consider doing it. We new that only one media execution would grab the attention of our whole potential audience: current adrenaline junkies and future ones.

While this idea looks simple, it was extremely technically challenging to pull off. The cake had to be completely custom built, with innovative physics calculations to ensure we had the right number of helium balloons and the right spacing between the two levels of balloons. This was to ensure they could sustain the weight of the inflatable cake and the BASE jumper. And the height had to be precisely calculated: too low and there's not enough time to open a parachute; too high and the balloons would lose pressure, causing the cake to fall. It took 6 months of negotiations, hundreds of rounds of designs, 1 massive engineering mishap, countless strenuous safety tests, and one crazy adrenaline junkie to say yes, to pull this stunt off.

When the inflatable cake started being lifted early in the morning, thousands of people living in JBR and on the Palm started to shoot videos and post them on social, increasing the awareness of the stunt before it even happened. The day after the jump, the Crown Prince of Dubai (who is known to love anything that gets the adrenaline flowing) posted our branded stunt video on his social media channel. To get his personal seal of approval is rare for a brand, so we were literally honoured. The film hit 1 million views within 24h, and to date we have reached a total of 3.7 million views. (That's same number of people who live in Dubai!) We gained over 464,370 likes, more than 11,630 comments and 351 coverages. After our Dare in the Air stunt, the number of tandem jumps increased by 26%.