benchmark report
airline marketing
Virgin America ‘getting lucky at 35,000ft’
digital
Aegean ‘take me there’ Based on research that over 1 million Greeks are currently living or working in another European country, Aegean Airlines have followed suit of other carriers such as Jetstar (who recently ran the competition ‘Take On The World’) who are trying to help reunite families and loved ones. Aegean are making a generous promise, that for every day until the end of 2013, they will offer an entrant to their new ‘Take Me There’ competition a free trip from many of their European destinations to a dozen Greek destinations and vice versa. Aegean spoke about the competition “[the competition] will provide one lucky par ticipant with a unique oppor tunity to claim a return ticket to any destination in the company’s network, both within
Greece and abroad, to visit friends or relatives that they have missed.” All they are asking is for applicants (who are over 18) to tell Aegean on their dedicated website who it is they want to meet and the story behind why they want to see them. Each application lasts for 30 days, meaning every applicant can reapply every month to be considered for the free return tickets. The competition has been suppor ted by a series of professionally shot videos who explain the story of three winners and the reasons why they wanted to travel.
In true Virgin style, the airline is playing the flir ting card to promote its new seatto-seat delivery service, encouraging passengers to “send an in-flight cocktail to that friendly stranger in seat 4A – and then follow up with a text message using the seat-to-seat chat function also on Red.” Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson also helped introduce the new seat-to-seat feature with a humorous video called “Sir Richard Branson’s Guide to Getting Lucky at 35,000 Feet.” The video, with a stereotypical comical soundtrack shot in his London office, plays to the Virgin mogul’s self confessed reputation of a modern day Casanova. The tone of the video is set instantaneously as a tongue-in-cheek homage to a British public information film.
The viral campaign (with over 120,000 views), featured by news channels around the world, star ts with Branson saying: “People ask me, ‘Your Excellency, how do you always end up on top?’ and the answer is, I don’t. Sometimes I end up in the mouth of a whale shark,” – referring to an incident in 2011 when he accidentally swam into the mouth of a whale shark in Mexico. “But enough about me. Here’s my guide to getting lucky at 35,000 feet.” The rest of the fantastical video plays to the rest of Sir Richard Bransons remarkable claims, which obviously can’t be matched, thus promoting the in-seat ordering system as a way to flir t with another passenger. (even though in reality its main use would be to order food for members of a group and/or family who weren’t able to sit together)
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