benchmark report
airline marketing
A monthly selection of the most innovative marketing campaigns launched by airlines around the world SimpliFlying | airlinetrends.com May 2013
benchmark report
airline marketing
welcome. inside
Published by market research agency airlinetrends.com and airline branding specialist SimpliFlying, the Airline Marketing Benchmark Repor t contains a wide range of airline marketing case studies each month, providing you with the latest and most innovative social, digital, experiential and traditional airline marketing campaigns recently launched by airlines around the world. Whether you’re looking for inspiration or are eager to help your airline move into the nex t stage of engagement, while also understanding how your airline marketing initiatives compare to campaigns from competitors in general, these repor ts are indispensable for airline professionals working in the f ield of marketing and corporate communications. The monthly repor ts also helps agencies that work with airlines stay on top of the latest innovative airline marketing initiatives.
Campaign of the Month
Technology is at the forefront of airline developments right now. See how airlines are utilizing technology’s ‘cool factor’ in their marketing campaigns.
Experiential
For any questions about the repor t, please contact Shubhodeep Pal at shubhodeep@simplif lying.com. As innovative campaigns come in all shapes and sizes, the Airline Marketing Benchmark Repor t is categorized into the following f ive themes:
Faced with ever more experienced consumers, who routinely ignore the commercials and ads thrown at them, airline brands are finding new ways to break through the adver tising clutter to reach consumers.
Digital / Online
With the huge popularity of smar tphones and tablets, airlines are tapping into these digital platforms to engage consumers, as well as releasing videos online which they hope will go viral.
Traditional
Despite the current focus on social, digital and experiential campaigns, airlines continue to serve up creative, traditional media-based, initiatives in order to reach a mass audience.
Social Media
Besides engaging their online audience via Facebook and Twitter-based campaigns, the airline industry is also busy experimenting with new social media platforms.
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campaign of the month airlines embracing ‘cool tech’ Tech-jetting
One of the hardest marketing messages to convey is that you are current, and understand the market. Recently more and more airlines are embracing their inner-geek to stay ahead of the trendcurve and cleverly selling themself as geek-chic. Such carriers include ‘Silicon valley favourite’ Virgin America, self confessed nerds. Infact so much so, one of their aircraft is dubbed #nerdbird to celebrate the large number of Wi-Fi users travelling on the San Francisco-Boston route, thanks to their fleet-wide onboard wi-fi and USB and power outlets at every seat. The #newAmerican Airlines has pushed hard to shake off its old image, and as
such is investing heavily into the tech world, we only last month repor ted how they played a big par t at the @SXSW event. The latest venture for the carrier is to launch an investment fund for star t up companies. Delta also turned more Star Trek than airline in February, showcasing its renewed focus on sleep at the annual TED conference in an innovative way. The airline hosted a talk from renowned Oxford neuroscientist and sleep exper t Dr. Russell Foster addressing jet lag and how the eye tells time and demonstrate his research in action with a so-called ‘Photon Shower’ – a small light chamber that conference attendees could enter for a shor t period of time to help reset their body clocks through a personalized light treatment.
new spottings
Alaska Airlines backs data contest to reduce flight delays
Alaska Airlines had recently joined forces with General Electric to offer a USD100,000 prize to a winning Singapore team who have created a new algorythm for predicting airline arrival times and help reduce passenger delays. The second phase of the ‘Flight Quest’ initiative is to have statisticians suggest ways that airlines could use their data to actually adapt to changing circumstances during a flight.
British Airways to hold 40,000ft hackathon
British Airways have now started championing technology advancements, and announced last month they were going to hold a ‘Hackathon’ aboard one
of their aircraft, travelling from future techhome San Francisco to London. The airline invited 100 top innovators to an 11-hour self dubbed “UnGrounded” hackathon. A number of high-profile founders, CEOs, and venture capitalists will all participate, with the aim of collaborating to create some solutions to global problems. The airline also joined up with RocketSpace recently, a startup accelerator based in San Francisco, to gain access to startups. The team will be asked to present their findings at the Decide Now Act (DNA) Summit workshop on arrival in London. “Great innovation happens when you bring people together face to face, not when you have people sitting alone in rooms” explained EVP of British Airways Simon Talling-Smith.
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Lufthansa ‘pop-up art gallery Stockholm’
experiental
Panasonic ‘Tweetathon’ Panasonic Avionics has been offering inflight wifi for several years now. To promote the fact that their product really took off this year with a number of new airlines introducing the service on longhaul flights, Panasonic organised a mid-air ‘Tweet-athon’.
Communications, said: “The Tweetathon is an exciting and innovative way to demonstrate just what is possible today from your seat on an aircraft. Airlines around the world are now embracing this technology and passengers are accepting it as second-nature.”
What better way to showcase Berlin, but by presenting it using pieces of ar t from the city’s ar tists? What if lovers of the ar tworks could then purchase them, and included in the price was a return ticket to Berlin to collect your ar twork from Berlin in person.
Giving even more reason to bring out your hand-held devices mid-flight, and using the hashtag #High5Live, passengers on six flights between five continents connected with each other – and their more ‘grounded’ Twitter followers. The reason for the campaign was to demonstrate both the requirement and power of their new eXConnect technology. Panasonic state “This allows passengers to use social media, access the Internet, and send and receive emails mid-flight.”David Bruner, Panasonic’s Vice President of Global
The event was broadcast live at the Aircraft Interiors Expo at the Panasonic exhibition booth throughout the fiver hour event, by displaying tweets live from the flights on large screens. Par ticipating airlines included AA (New York to Sao Paulo), LH (Frankfur t to Seattle), EY (Abu Dhabi to London), Aer Lingus (Dublin to New York), JAL (Tokyo to New York), United (San Francisco to Sydney).
This was the concept for Luthansa’s first pop-up Art Gallery, based in Berlin. DDB Stockholm were commissioned to pull the whole idea together, and in collaboration with Gallery Essays & Observations in Berlin, it featured 15 unique works from Berlin-based ar tists including Diana Ar tus, Katharina Blanke Stefan Guzy / Bjorn Wiede and Staffan Larsson.
the ar tists work is available for purchase on their dedicated (and very much Lufthansa branded) gallery website. The website showcases the travel dates and times, most of which including a return date a couple of days later so as to be able to explore and enjoy the city of Berlin for a little longer. This isn’t DDB Stockholm’s first collaboration with Lufthansa, who also created an app that wakes you up to the noises of a randomly selected city.
Interestingly, the ar tworks (most of which have already been sold) seem realistically and perhaps even affordably priced, and
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British Airways ‘It’s A Jumbo Job’ A 747 has loaded before each flight a total of 1,263 items of metal cutlery, 1,291 items of china crockery, 538 meal trays, 735 glasses, 650 paper cups, 34 metal teapots, 220 drinks stirrers, 500 coasters, 233 toothpicks, 2,000 ice cubes, 99 full bottles and 326 quarter bottles of wine, 700 small cans of fizzy drinks, 164 bags of nuts in Club World, 337 cushions and pillows, 337 sets of headphones, 337 headrest covers, 435 air sickness bags, 58 toilet rolls, 40 extension seatbelts for children, 340 safety cards, 337 copies of High Life magazine, 40 skyflyer packs for children, and five first aid kits. British Airways created an oversized piece of artwork on one of their hanger floors, created purely by items found onboard one of their 747s. The ar twork was created to highlight the amount of items that are loaded onto each 747 flight.
VS Little Red ‘3D street artists’ Rod Green, British Airways’ head global supply chain said: “It’s a huge job getting a jumbo in to the air, let alone a fleet of 52 every day. There are teams across the airline working together 365 days a year to ensure that all 27,260 items are delivered on time and to the right place to ensure our customers enjoy the very best travel experience. When we receive our new aircraft, the challenge will be even greater.” The ar twork was pieced together over 7 hours by a team of 50 British Airways workers, and British Airways released a time lapse video of the ar twork being created.
‘Painting the town red’, Virgin Atlantic also took to the floor to make their own ar tworks. This time, the ar twork was drawn on the streets of Manchester in the UK. This was to celebrate the launch of their Little Red domestic services.
The image was hosted by cabin crew from the airline, who posed with passers by to “give the general public a chance to emulate a famous Branson-style wing walk in the company of our glamorous cabin crew”
The ar twork, created by 3D Joe and Max, is an ‘anamorphic’ image, distor ting the perspective of it’s surroundings to create an illusion of being par t of the scene it’s painted into.
Virgin Atlantic have a long history of Sir Richard Branson personally appearing at the launch of routes, including a wing walk with crew or performances. This time, Sir Richard Branson appeared at the launch of sister routes to Glasgow and Edinburgh wearing a kilt, jokingly lifting it to reveal his underwear with the message ‘Stiff Competition’ - a friendly jibe at their British rival.
The image was of the Virgin Atlantic’s Little Red fleet, flying (perhaps a little bizarrely) over Sydney harbour in Australia, but this was to showcase the connections that the airline can now provide from Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The first time, since airline par tner bmi was sold to rival British Airways.
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social
Qantas ‘Pack The Spirit of Australia’
KLM ‘Claim Your Place In Space’ Perhaps one of the biggest aviation prizes ever was won last month. KLM launched one of the biggest social media campaigns to date, offering one very special ticket for one lucky winner to go to space.
April. Using a very slick and sophisticated user interface, allowing people to enter both distance laterally and ver tically they thought the balloon would travel before expanding so much it popped.
Whilst Virgin Galactic has been gaining most of the column inches when it comes to space travel, the campaign was designed to showcase KLM’s pioneering spirit and entrepreneurial characteristics, and suppor ted Space Expedition Corporation (SXC), a revolutionary space project that aims to launch the first commercial space trip from the Caribbean island of Curacao (a KLM destination) from 1 January 2014.
A GPS tracker and a camera in the balloon streamed data directly to the website, which displayed real time information of the balloon’s exact location viewed by 32,513 people as it streamed live on the internet.
This campaign encouraged users to predict the outcome of a high altitude balloon that was launched on the 22nd
The winner was Pedro Henrique Dória Nehme, from Brazil. A total of 130,000 people worldwide par ticipated and the accompanying YouTube film was viewed more than 3,200,000 times.
Off the back of the success from doing a similar campaign with US Show ‘Oprah’ in 2010, Qantas recently par tnered with another US chatshow, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, to offer each of the studio audience a return f light to Melbourne from one of their USA destinations. CEO of the Qantas Group, Alan Joyce, said helping to bring The Ellen DeGeneres Show to Australia was a fantastic oppor tunity to market the country to a massive worldwide audience.
Nicole Kidman in an episode that reached over 16 million people. This was estimated to have an advertising value of close to USD147milion. Running off the back of this recent TV campaign, sending Australians over to the USA, Qantas ran a fur ther Instagram / Twitter campaign, asking tweeters to send a picture of how they would ‘Pack the Spirit of Australia’ into their suitcase, 5 lucky people then won a pair of return f lights to LA and a ticket to see The Ellen Show live.
Qantas has par tnered with Swisse Wellness to suppor t an initiative as par t of the airline’s ongoing commitment to promoting Australia to the world. The visit was announced by Ellen DeGeneres and Swisse Wellness Global Ambassador
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airline marketing
Finnair Quality Hunters (3rd edition) Quality Hunters 2013 is a model for co-created service development where the most promising ideas of what makes a travel experience great and identify points of improvement along the passenger’s journey provided by the community are selected to be developed fur ther with the professionals at Finnair and Finavia. The website is suppor ted by a Twitter feed, Facebook group and Pinterest board, and the site itself sets itself out as a “crowdsourcing initiative designed to improve the air travel service experience, where ideas will be used to make travelling smoother for everyone. We welcome all ideas from real travellers.” 10 candidates with succesful conversations over a wide range of topics “At Home, At the Airpor t, On Board and On Arrival”, as voted by the moderators of the site, will be asked
Air New Zealand ‘No Lag To London’ to join a workshop with Finnair and Helsinki airpor t. Quality Hunters 2013 follows two previous award-winning crowdsourcing initiatives run by the two companies. The 2010 Rethink Quality initiative inspired Finnair and Helsinki Airpor t to f ind new ways of looking at quality and in 2011, Quality Hunters Season 2 proved the power of a great community in creating innovative ideas to improve air travel. The Helsinki Airpor t Book Swap, which opened in summer 2012 and the vegetarian meals introduced on longhaul f lights later in the autumn are both examples of successful ideas co-developed by the Quality Hunters community, Finnair and Helsinki Airpor t.
Long haul air travel has long been the scourge for business travellers, most passengers stepping off the flight in some kind of post 40,000ft haze. Air New Zealad have created a focus group of uber-frequent travellers, whose sole job is to finesse the travel experience to help reduce jet-lag.
Air New Zealand shared it’s secrets to better travel with followers on the @AirNZUSA Twitter feed throughout April - from the best position to sleep in and pre-flight habits, to what to eat and what to drink. The twitter feed also released an infographic to break-down the habits of travellers.
The campaign #NoLagtoLondon was moderated by Lily Kosner, the Los Angeles-based website editor for PeterGreenberg.com (@ PeterSGreenberg). She led the group, including travel writer Harriet Baskas through a range of discussion topics from what to eat on a f light to sleeping positions via a wealth of creative research methods including haikus, Rorschach inkblot tests and word associations.
The campaign was suppor ted by a Vine competition to win a return trip to New Zealand from London, and also a wealth of ‘No Lag Swag’ “Air New Zealand is committed to delivering an unparalleled in-flight experience to all passengers and we recognize that people flying 10-plus hours have specific needs,” says Chris Myers, Air New Zealand’s Vice President, The Americas.
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airline marketing
Air Canada ‘Earn your Wings’ Air Canada have created a competition, where Aeroplan miles can be earned for being one of the top 25 ‘wings’ winners at the end of the competition. Apar t from the obvious city badges, there are a wealth of specialist badges, designed to entice the passenger to travel more, such as a Pacific Coast badge, only earned when visiting 3 Pacific Coast cities. Or the Opera House badge, only earned when travelling to a city with a famous Opera house, such as Sydney, London, Paris or New York. The campaign star ted in April and the vir tual wings can be earned on any flights between 11th April and 16th June. The share of the 10,000,000 Aeroplan miles will be split amongst the top 25 tier.
Singapore Airlines ‘Like To Unlock’ Ever since the dawn of Monopoly, people have always wanted to gain ‘a full set’ of collectables, so this clever gamification where you win a series of ‘wings’ for travelling is a new way of enticing frequent travel with a carrier.
A clever Facebook app, ‘Like to Unlock’ exclusively for Singapore Airlines, allowed ‘likers’ to unlock special discount codes to favourite Singapore Airlines destinations by achieving over 1000 ‘thumbs up’ for each of the promoted destinations.
This ‘mile building’ campaign isn’t the first for Air Canada’s Aeroplan. Earlier in the year the ‘Stars’ competition was run, allowing Aeroplan members the oppor tunity to earn up to 16,500 extra miles by spending with their 75 par tners, representing over 150 brands.
The number of seats on each of the destination were then limited to 200, creating a high demand for the heavily discounted fares. The destinations were released in three weekly waves, the first week included Ho Chi Minh, Male in the Maldives and Melbourne. The following week starred Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney. The last wave had Bangkok, Beijing and Per th featured. By the end of the campaign, each of the 9 destinations had both been fully ‘unlocked’ and the limited seats sold out.
Off the back of the 3 week social network campaign, Singapore Airlines also ran a Lucky Draw, ‘Buy, Share and Win’ where by purchasing a ticket between 1st April and 31st May 2013, and sharing the online experience by answering a few questions, one lucky winner could win a pair of economy tickets to any Singapore Airlines destination. This allowed Singapore Airlines to capture vital information about their online experience, whilst offering an incentive to collect the data.
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digital
Jetstar ‘Take On The World’ To celebrate its 100 aircraft milestone, Jetstar has targetted a campaign to travel vloggers in Australia and New Zealand to offer them a once-in-a-lifetime prize to make their travel dream come true. The campaign “Take on the World” is headlined by a YouTube video that tells the story of three local individuals, a maid, a pastry chef, and a Muay Thai fighter living in Singapore and watches their journey to a dream destination on Jetstar. This inspiring campaign is designed to inspire other entrants to submit their own video applications, which are available to view on the competitions stand alone website. The prize will be won by 3 successful entrants and their (up to) 4 companions.
Arik Air ‘Relax’n’Vibe’ The winners, who will become ‘Jetstar Ambassadors’ may also have their footage from their dream holiday included in JetStar’s adver tising. Jetstar mentioned about the prize “From flights and accommodation, to transfers and spending money, Jetstar will provide the winners with what they need to ‘Take on the World’ and be united with a special person, place or experience. The winners can bring up to four companions along on their journey to share this once-in-a-lifetime trip with the people that matter most.” “Jetstar exists to make travel more accessible and connect people to share special experiences with their family and friends” said David Koczkar, Jetstar Chief Commercial Officer.
Nigerian carrier Arik Air has recently teamed up with iRoking, Nigeria’s top online music platform which provides its visitors with on-demand access to the latest developments and trends from the Nigeria’s music scene. Both companies par tnered up to release a playlist, Relax’n’Vibe, that consists of 12 tracks with over 52 minutes of music from Nigerian ar tists. The music mix is set to provide relaxation and positive atmosphere for passengers travelling onboard Arik Air’s aircrafts, on both domestic and international routes. Whilst available to listen on-board through the in-f light enter tainment, the playlist is not exclusively tied up to Arik Air’s IFE. It can be also enjoyed by anyone with access to the Internet. The tracks are available for free and can be
downloaded to any mobile devices from iRoking website. The ‘relaxation’ playlist features West African superstars such as 2Face, Tiwa Savage, Waje, P Square and Flavour to provide the very best that the Nigerian music scene has to offer. The list, as well as being available on iRoking, is also available on YouTube, and has it’s own Twitter hash tag #ArikiROKING Arik Air is successfully using West Africa’s musical heritage to promote the airline on the international stage.
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Qantas & Emirates ‘What A Wonderful World’
traditional
Norwegian Posters Norwegian is fast becoming the number one airline of Scandinavia. This latest campaign aims to promote their flights from Sweden to cities around Europe.
The Norwegian posters were combined into the patchwork posters, to co-brand the campaign, along with the message “Right now! European Cities 299 kr”
The campaign uses posters from cities around their network of independent events, carefully handpicked by Norwegian who curated the collection to give a true representation of the city, away from the touristic image normally por trayed in adver tising campaigns. The mix of posters was then placed as a series of collages around the Swedish hubs to promote the airline’s network. Norwegian stated “Our solution is to change perspective – from traditional pictures of the Eiffel tower in Paris or Big Ben in London to the City streets and all the interesting spots one can enjoy there.”
A YouTube video shows how the campaigns were placed around the biggest cities in Sweden. The poster campaign was combined with a print campaign, that featured in printed magazines and newspapers in Sweden, that took the form of a real ‘events diary’ again curated by the airline. The adver torial style campaign is a smar t way of positioning the airline as an honest, current and culturaly-aware carrier of the cities it flies to.
As Emirates and Qantas have now joined forces to expand their networks, the Australian carrier has showcased this fact with a cross-platform video that conveys the message “Together connecting the globe” featuring both Emirates and Qantas branding. To really show off Qantas’ international coverage, the video, shot by Parliament Films and directed by Toby Morris, with no involvement from Qantas’ creative agency Droga5, covers por ts of call such as New York, Dubai, London, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, Texas and Istanbul. Strangely though, almost all of these cities are actually already (or used to be) Qantas destinations. Parliament had already shot a video to suppor t the recent launch of Qantas’ new uniforms, designed by Australian designer Mar tin Grant.
The 1 minute 50 second footage will be showcased on Facebook and on TV and is also available to view on YouTube. The film was dubbed “What a wonderful world” and off the back of this campaign message Qantas launched a Facebook competition to suppor t the new video and marketing direction. The social media competition was open only to Australian residents, where they could win a pair of business class tickets to anywhere in the world on the Qantas and Emirates network by uploading their own breathaking travel image for their chance to win.
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about us. At SimpliFlying, we believe in thinking differently about aviation marketing. We thrive at the intersection of aviation and marketing, and in the past four years have advised over 30 airlines and airports on customer engagement and marketing strategy. Our growing clientele includes Airbus, LATAM Airlines, Turkish Airlines, Toronto Pearson and more. One of the top five most influential on Twitter with over 12,000 followers, with over a million YouTube views, SimpliFlying. com is also recognised by Flightglobal as one of the Top 2 blogs on aviation.
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