Close-Up: Live Issue - Virgin reaps rewards of live-to-air advertising.(live advertising trends in business promotions)

Despite the difficulties involved in creating live ads, Virgin's V Festival commercial brought huge response.

For hundreds of thousands of music lovers, British summer-time is now all about which festival you're going to visit.

For companies such as Virgin Mobile, which runs the V Festival, and Mean Fiddler, which now runs Glastonbury, it means a summer of money-making, product placement and advertising to huge captive audiences.

However, the appeal of the music festival has now extended far beyond the original hippie ideal of music and free love. The clientele is more varied, with all age ranges and demographics in attendance and lots of advertisements.

This extra interest was proved by this year's V Festival, which sold out within 48 hours. It was even rumoured that one pair of hospitality tickets was sold on eBay for pounds 600.

In promoting the V Festival, held on 20 and 21 August in Chelmsford and Staffordshire, Virgin Mobile wanted an ad campaign that not only increased awareness of the company's branding of the festival, but also involved viewers and promoted the feel of the event.

'We basically gave Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R an open brief. But it had to be big, brash and unique,' the Virgin Mobile brand director, James Kydd, says.