benchmark report
airline marketing
A monthly selection of the most innovative marketing campaigns launched by airlines around the world SimpliFlying | airlinetrends.com July 2013
benchmark report
airline marketing
welcome. 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.
inside 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 four 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.
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.
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.
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airline marketing
experiental
Delta lands in Canary Wharf Joining the many airlines who have partnered with football clubs, Delta Air Lines has teamed with new football partner, Chelsea FC, so as to promote its business service to workers in Canary Wharf in March. Delta became the club’s official global airline in a multi-year deal in July 2012. Partnering up with London-based design agency Zero Collective, RS Displays created the Delta Pavilion, a temporary glass structure that showcased Delta’s ‘Business Elite’ flat-bed seating. Flight attendants were on hand to offer advice about Delta’s products, routes and services. Visitors could also sample the Delta BusinessElite experience by testing the 180° flat-bed seat, try out the latest ‘Fly Delta’ app and show their competitive spirit with a game of table football, which was all documented on their supporting
KLM ‘Pack & Go Challenge’ stand-alone Delta branded website, www. deltapresents.com. The temporary Delta space also housed a football competition where teams could win Delta prizes by demonstrating their striking skills against the clock, scoring as many points as possible in 60 seconds. To suppor t the football theme Canary Wharf banks including Barclays, JP Morgan, HSBC and Credit Suisse signed up to compete in the Canary Wharf Cup. Chelsea players attended the final, which took place on Wednesday 20th March.
Dutch airline KLM wanted to raise their profile at select UK regional airports in line with their long running Pack & Go marketing initiative. To support this, mcm creative group devised the Pack & Go Challenge – a fun game show played at shopping centres by members of the public who could compete for free tickets to long haul KLM destinations.
staff’ the ‘passengers’ then met the host, a KLM Captain, who took charge of the game which involved packing a suitcase with 26 items, in alphabetical order in the fastest time possible. The challenge was staffed by flight attendants to time and score each contestant and times ranged from 30 seconds to 5 minutes during it’s run between January and May this year.
Mcm developed the idea of a touring roadshow visiting London, Glasgow, Bristol and Manchester and introducing the Pack&Go Challenge. The campaign was focused on engaging consumers and interaction with the brand to ensure that KLM’s print and outdoor advertising, which commenced in September 2012, was brought to life.
Results have been impressive, over 5,000 new likes to KLM’s Facebook page , over 2,000 sign ups to their membership programme and an overall 30% increase on enquiries for flights. Also suppor ting the experiential element, KLM launched a Facebook ‘Pacman’ game, created by Keith Kornson.
Once ‘checked in’ by KLM flight ‘ground
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Emirates aviation experience
Delta ‘test your ping pong skills’
Emirates is taking its marketing efforts in the UK to another level by opening an indoor aviation themed attraction in London this month. The newest public attraction for the capital, the ‘Emirates Aviation Experience’, will be the first of its kind globally.
The centre will target people of all ages and will open to the public in time for the city’s peak tourism period this July. One year on from the launch of the Emirates AirLine, the ‘Emirates Aviation Experience’ is expected to fur ther stimulate tourism and development in the area.
The new tourist experience, located at the South side of the already operational Emirates ‘Air Line’ cable car in London, will cover an area of just under 300 sqm and will provide an insight into the operations and modern achievements of commercial air travel. The centre will also host the world’s first public commercial flight simulators including two Airbus 380s and two Boeing 777s, utilising full landscape visuals, allowing participants to practice their take-off and landing skills.
Emirates has a strong affiliation with this area of London following the launch of the Emirates AirLine, London’s popular cable car system across the River Thames, in a 10 year sponsorship deal announced in June 2012. Emirates’ association with the UK runs deep. It also sponsors London’s Arsenal football club, and has recently been announced as one of the top 10 UK airline websites to be visited.
Taking a cue from the likes of Emirates, Turkish Airlines, Qatar Airways and Etihad, which all have invested heavily in sponsorships of major spor ts such as soccer and basketball to create brand recognition among the general public, Delta has teamed with major baseball league teams in the USA and earlier this year opened a Sky360 lounge inside Stamford Bridge stadium, home of British Premier League soccer team Chelsea FC as par t of a wider sponsorship agreement. In a fun gesture to passengers leaving from London Heathrow Airpor t on June 18, Delta surprised travellers flying out of the airpor t’s Terminal 4 by offering them the chance to test their table tennis skills against none other than defending Wimbledon Champion Serena Williams, who had just arrived from JFK on an
overnight Delta Air Lines flight on her way to the 2013 edition of the tournament. Video here. With the surprise appearance of the current number 1 of woman tennis, Delta aimed to showcase its renewed long-haul Business Class product with fully flat beds and new Westin Heavenly Bedding. Says Tim Mapes, Delta’s SVP for Marketing, “We’ve gone flat-out to give customers a great night’s sleep on board our flights into London, and Serena’s form today shows that Delta’s BusinessElite flat-bed seats ensure customers arrive rested for a day’s work or play.”
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airline marketing
social
British Airways ‘Perfect Day Live Twitter Tour Guide’
Scoot ‘The world’s longest virtual flight’ When the carrier decided to drum up some publicity by putting on a “virtual flight” for customers with smartphones, it might have expected the process to go without a hitch. Sadly their social media campaign, which involved inviting passengers to ‘board’ their vir tual flight on their smar t phone, suffered a series of technical glitches meaning that 5,000 of the registered competitors were unable to log into the app before the competition star ted, meaning only 2,000 people managed to par ticipate in the campaign, even after delaying the star t by 15 minutes. The concept was based on a ‘last-man standing’ concept, by inviting participants to board a virtual flight, and remain onboard by tapping a button every minute for as long as they could. The winner was awarded
SGD20,000 cash and free flights for a year. The problems, which included entrants being dropped unexpectedly from the app, led to escalating animosity towards Scoot, which received more than 1,000 comments on the issue on its Facebook page. Despite the hiccups, Mr Mohammed Firdaus Ismani, 29, outlasted more than 2,000 other contenders - by tapping on the button for a total of 18 hours - to win the grand prize of $20,000 and a year’s wor th of flights to any Scoot destination. Scoot sent out a lengthy email to all par ticipants apologising and explaining what went wrong. The airline is set to run the competition again, once they have the app up and running again.
Par t of British Airways £5bn investment over the next five years in a programme of improvements to make life more comfor table in the air and on the ground for customers, including developing their social media platform. The latest par t of this investment was to develop a ‘Perfect Day’ application to help piece together ideas of things to do in their destinations. As par t of a trial taking the airline’s Perfect Day app from the web to the city streets, a ‘live tour guide’ day was created back in April. The initiative made British Airways customers become live tour guides for the day. On April 11th, a blogger was guided around Rome in real time via live suggestions from customers using the airline’s Twitter feed. The trial was run in
par tnership with Cedar, who coordinated the event. Progress around the Italian capital was captured by a stream of photos thanks to a hi-tech mini camera, which took thousands of images automatically throughout the day. Travel blogger Paul Steele, owner of the highly popular Bald Hiker travel blog, tweeted on the British Airways account followers with hashtag #PDRome to describe where he went and to interact with the British Airways 270,000 twitter followers. The photos were shared on Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram and by posting on Facebook. The campaign however, only attracted a handful of responses with the hashtag. The video of the event only received 4,500 views.
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Delta ‘Social Magazine on Flipboard’
American Airlines ‘fake your British accent’ Following a contest in February of this year on video sharing app Vine, in which American Airlines challenged its fans and followers to make a 6-second Vine clip that tells why they deserved to f ly with the airline’s new B777-300ER to London, American Airlines has launched another Vine-based campaign. As AA is letting another of their brand new planes loose on a major route—in this case, from Los Angeles to LondonHeathrow—the airline is inviting Britons and Americans to make a shor t Vine video of themselves practicing their best American (if they are British) or British (if they are American) accent by saying the phrase “The #newAmerican is arriving. I want to f ly Los Angeles to London on the 777-300ER.” (or “London to Los Angeles” if they are from the UK.)
To enter, par ticipants have to follow @ AmericanAir on Twitter, tweet their Vine and include the #newAmerican hashtag. The contest closed on June 15 and the video explaining the campaign has been watched 8,000 times on YouTube so far. Vine was acquired by Twitter in 2012 and has about 20 million users and since recently is facing competition from Instagram (which in turn is owned by Facebook) who has just launched its own 15-second video tool.
Delta is coming up with innovative ways to communicate its renewed focus on a good night of sleep onboard. Earlier this year, the airline hosted a talk at the annual TED conference 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. Delta’s latest initiative sees Delta curating a ‘social magazine’ on Flipboard, the popular iOS and Android reading app. Called ‘The Science of Sleep’, the digital magazine is a compilation of sleep-related ar ticles that advises travellers on how to deal with insufficient sleep, par ticularly as
a consequence of excessive travelling. For example, one ar ticle gives ’12 simple tips to improve your sleep’, and another provides travellers with “a battle plan for jet lag.” As of the writing of this ar ticle, the magazine had already gained about 10,000 readers and had curated over 60 ar ticles that had witnessed over 130,000 page flips. Flipboard has received plaudits for its design and usability, which allows users to literally ‘flip’ the page to read news like a newspaper on their device. The free service currently has over 50 million users.
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Turkish Airlines ‘#GoDortmund’ Besides being the carrier of choice for top European soccer teams such as Barcelona and Manchester United, Turkish Airlines in May signed a 3-year agreement with Borussia Dor tmund to become the German football club’s preferred airline for all international flights. Hamdi Topçu, Chairman of Turkish Airlines commented on the par tnership: “Turkish Airlines and Borussia Dor tmund share a similar success story. Dor tmund has a very notable set of players, many of them young and successful. The company also invest heavily in talent building. Several of the Borussia Dor tmund players are members of both the German and Turkish national teams.” As par t of the sponsorship, Turkish Airlines has introduced a new logojet which at
digital & mobile
KLM ‘NFC airport game’ the end of May flew the team to London for their Champions League final against Bayern Munchen (who were travelling with Lufthansa).
Earlier this year, KLM and Korean online marketing agency Asiance launched the world’s first NFC airpor t game at Incheon airpor t in Korea in January this year.
On board, Turkish Airlines surprised the players with a specially created newspaper that was made of best of luck fan tweets. Both THY and Borussia Dor tmund asked their fans on their social media sites to tweet the Dor tmund team good luck messages and to share their best wishes with the hashtag #GoDortmund.
To make more people aware of the service KLM offers between Korea and Europe, and also promote KLM services, the airline organized the mobile game for travellers waiting in line at Incheon airpor t. The time to complete the game, which passengers were invited to play was kept shor t on purpose so they could use the application while waiting to check in their luggage. As an incentive, if they managed to answer all the questions right they had a chance win access to the VIP lounge, used by KLM, to spend some quality time before take-off.
Fans from all over the world par ticipated in this campaign. After 25,127 tweets and and 8,123 retweets, T urkish Airlines printed the best of the best suppor t tweets and distributed the result on the team’s Turkish Airlines flight to London.
By waving a smar tphone over the NFC tag on the campaign billboard at the airpor t, the game was launched on the traveller’s mobile instantly. Besides NFC it was also possible to star t the game by scanning a QR code or entering the mobile web address. This video explains the NFC-based mobile game in more detail. The campaign ended in mid March. During the campaign new winners were announced every day.
Near Field Communication (NFC) was used to provide easy access to the game.
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KLM ‘Aviation Empire’
Thai ‘LINE stickers’ LINE, is an international instant messenger and VOIP calling application for smar tphones. Thai Airways recently launched its official LINE account as another way to communicate with its customers, allowing customers to receive latest information about THAI’s ticket promotions and other activities.
Danuj Bunnag, THAI Executive Vice President, Commercial Depar tment, said the first set received good customer feedback. THAI was the first airline to introduce LINE stickers and the only airline to have more than two million members joining its official LINE account in one month.
To celebrate the launch of the service, which is one of the most popular download in various countries, customers who joined THAI’s Official Account on LINE were able to download 16 car toon stickers of airplanes, pilots, cabin crew for free, which could be used to illustrate users chat conversations using the program.
THAI introduced its second set of LINE stickers in February this year to thank its customers and to create a new means of communicating with customers through social media that “forges good customer relations”.
Over the past 6 months, THAI have launched a series of free downloads to celebrate their continued par tnership.
Their latest campaign involves LINE camera stamps, which have also been released to fur ther develop the interactive branding par tnership with THAI to celebrate the 4 million download mark.
Dutch airline KLM is giving consumers a chance to experience the rush of running an international airline. On June 27th, the airline launched Aviation Empire, a Simslike simulation game for mobile devices. The free game gives users (some of whom voted on Facebook for its name) the chance to vir tually run the airline by choosing flight destinations, investing in aircraft and designing airports as time and technology change. Aviation Empire is quite robust for a free game, ranging from choosing your own fleet and destinations to outfitting your own airpor t. The game will give any frequent flyer the opportunity to toy with the inner workings of the airline industry and, using social media as a launchpad, it will host a community of ‘airline CEOs’
trying to fly high in the competitive industry. Players can run their virtual airline, themed after the KLM fleet, on both iOS and Android mobile devices. The 3D strategic game uses GPS technology to localise the experience, and is available as a free app for iOS and Android mobile devices. A teaser video announcing the launch of the game was already posted on YouTube in February 2013 and so far has generated over 35,000 views.
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traditional
American Airlines ‘interactive TV trial’ American Airlines and its agency Universal McCann earlier this year ran a campaign in the UK called The New American, across connected TVs and Blu-ray players from manufacturers including Samsung, Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba. The trials are being run by video ad network Rovi to test consumer reaction to campaigns run across the internetconnected TVs and Blu-ray players which are par t of Rovi’s network. Interactive banner ads were placed at selected areas of the TV interface including the enter tainment search areas. Viewers that clicked through on the ads were taken through to a branded destination where they could watch video content. The airline has repor ted a 254 per cent hike in “brand favourability” from viewers
traditional
S7 Airlines ‘echo cards’ exposed to the brand ads versus a nonexposed control group, claiming a 308 per cent lift in viewers’ association with key brand statements. Meanwhile purchase intent was also higher for those exposed the ads, with viewers “four times” more likely to book a flight with the company than the non-exposed groups, according to Rovi. Commented American Airlines’ marketing director for EMEA Steve Davis: “Consumer enter tainment viewing habits are clearly evolving and moving to more platforms and devices. We are pleased to be teaming up with innovators like Rovi to help us use these new consumer touch points to increase brand awareness and a greater understanding of ‘The new American Airlines’ among our key target audiences.”
A poster and a postcard that ‘echoes’ was the latest print campaign that Russian low-cost carrier S7 Airlines took on. The airline’s creative agency Good, took the idea of illustrated mountain scenes that echoed your voice when you spoke at the posters that were placed around Moscow. The interactive print campaign was then fur ther reinforced by including the messages ‘Flights from 300 Euros’ and ‘Ski equipment goes free!’ that spoke out after any interaction.
were sent to targeted gold card frequent flier members who had relevant interests who would fly the mountain routes, such as skiers and snow boarders. The postcard campaign managed to increase bookings by 25% and had a positive response from the top fliers it was sent to. The poster campaign also attributed to a general increase in flight bookings during the period of the campaign.
The posters and ‘echo-cards’ were created by using micro-hardware, (basically a small sound effect machine featuring a mic and speakers) to create an echo effect when spoken to. To suppor t the poster campaign, postcards
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Qantas ‘Mars Rover’ Qantas has unveilled a new campaign intended to push the airline’s frequent flyer program past the 10 million member mark. Featuring a life-size replica of NASA’s Mars rover ‘Curiosity’ (the real machine is currently trundling around the red planet), the campaign is designed to showcase the many ways which members can earn points through avenues other than flying. “The campaign tagline ‘For Every Journey’ highlights that members have hundreds of oppor tunities to earn points across every day activities from going to the supermarket to going on holidays” explains Lesley Grant, CEO of Qantas Loyalty. Sudeep Gohil, CEO of creative agency Droga5, said that securing the use of Curiosity from NASA had been a creative
coup. “Being able to use such a likeable and unique personality has made this campaign something really different. Curiosity moves, she makes eye contact and she communicates in a way that seems very human.” The TV commercial aired in mid-June (and has been watched 120,000 times on YouTube so far), and will be followed by ads in digital, print and outdoor media. The campaign will run for six weeks, with the replica ‘Curiosity’ embarking on a national tour including roving through airpor t terminals, Qantas lounges and shopping centres. The tour star ts in Brisbane before moving to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Per th.
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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.
Airlinetrends.com is an independent industry and consumer trends research agency that monitors the global aviation industry for commercial innovations in response to changing consumer behavior. Airlinetrends.com repor ts its f indings in a free monthly email newsletter as well as in paid trend repor ts and corporate trend sessions. Get in touch at info@airlinetrends.com or visit www.airlinetrends.com.
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