The ads launch today (December 22) at 7.15pm during ITV’s Emmerdale and feature 100 people, some of them real Virgin Holidays customers, running down a Barbados beach in slow motion. An aerial shot from above shows them racing towards hundreds of floating lilos spelling out the word ‘sale’, while a voiceover comments: “The Virgin Holidays Sale, it won’t last forever.”

The tour operator expects to take as much as 40% of its annual revenue during this key trading period, and the operator says its new campaign “has been designed to instill a sense of urgency in the customer”.

This is the first extension of Virgin Holidays’ #SeizeTheHoliday proposition that launched in September with an 18-location live television advert, and provides an indication as to how the company intends to use its new communications platform over the following years.

Virgin is investing in marketing throughout this period in the hope of turning what is a commonly known time for discounted trading into an ‘occasion-based’ moment – in the same way that Harrods has achieved popular recognition of its sales period.

Jay Kossifos, Virgin’s head of brand and campaigns, said: “Our new Seize The Holiday platform is designed to show everyday people that the world is literally at their fingertips – we hope we’ve delivered the message in a slightly different way in our sales period, as we did with our live advert in September. Whatever way people interpret this, the message is simple, don’t just sit there and let the world pass you by.”