Cathay Pacifc x LinkedIn | While many brands target their general audiences through Facebook and Twitter, Cathay Pacific turned to LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network, as a platform for a highly targeted campaign. For its American market, Cathay Pacific had a goal to increase brand awareness among business travellers who often fly to Asia. Tapping into LinkedIn user data, Cathay Pacific targeted Asia-focused professionals, 70 percent of whom planned on taking “one or more business-class flights between the United States and Asia in the next 12 months”. The airline then placed a blend of targeted LinkedIn display ads and three sponsored polls, which asked questions about what travellers would do with their loyalty points. The polls resulted in 1,324 responses from business travellers. Additionally, 97 product recommendations were generated from LinkedIn's so-called recommended ads, which added more social recommendations for Cathay Pacific. Through data collected via LinkedIn's platform, Cathay Pacific's polls also gathered traveler information to use in future campaigns and on-board. Cathay Pacific, which now has 18,000 followers on its LinkedIn product page, ran the campaign for a total of nine months.
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Lufthansa ‘Anywake’ App | In an increasingly mobile-centric marketing world, mobile apps are seen as a key to reaching customers. Smartphone apps have been used by airlines to touch various points in the ‘Connected Travelers’ lifecycle. Lufthansa’s latest app is called ‘Anywake’, and functions as a daily alarm clock to wake customers up to the sounds of different cities around the world. To turn the alarm off, users are required to guess the city whose sounds are waking them up.
The unique feature of Anywake lies in its integration with Lufthansa booking: a correct city-sound match guess is rewarded with a discount for Lufthansa airfare to that city. If the user guesses incorrectly, they must wait for the following day for another chance. The app (for iOS and Android) is only available for the Swedish market and was developed by Swedish agencies Monterosa and DDB Stockholm. Lufthansa also released an instructional video on operating Anywake, which generated over 14,000 views on YouTube. Additionally, the app is also marketed as a way for downloaders to functionally cater to their wanderlust during the cold, dark Swedish winter months when it’s hard to wake up. Thus, Anywake offers an innovative look at how smartphone apps can be implemented in the airline digital space.
8 | Airline Marketing Benchmark Report | December 2012