benchmark report
airline marketing
micro prix tgv
social
#racetheplane
SNCF
Besides looking at industry competitors for inspiration for their marketing campaigns, airlines can benefit as well from initiatives in related industries. In recent reports we have covered Schiphol Airport’s ‘Big Wave Goodbye ’ initiative and airport-based campaigns from consumer brands such as Heineken and DE coffee. Recently, French rail operator SNCF launched an innovative experiential campaign to promote its lowest fares. SNCF and its ad agency TBWA Paris at Paris’ Gare de Lyon train station created one of the biggest vivariums in Europe by filling a large glass tank with insects and small fare labels. Travelers then could use a joystick to control microscopes inside the tank and get a closeup of the bugs, some of them crawling over the tiny price tags.
NOVEMBER 2013 ISSUE
BRITISH AIRWAYS
To support the real-life vivarium, a beautiful online video has been created, whereby the TGV micro-prices have filmed in a microscopic world surrounded by more than 500 insects, producing surprising images.
In September, British Airways invited Twitter users to #RaceThePlane in a digital competition to mark the arrival of its Dreamliner fleet. The aim of the campaign was to pit a virtual ‘Tweetliner’ plane (‘powered’ by tweets) against a real Dreamliner flight from London to Toronto. Participants in the campaign had to tweet or retweet a message with #RaceThePlane in a 7.5 hour window (the actual flying time of the flight) in order to win one of five ticket pairs to Toronto, one of BA’s 787 destinations. The more tweets mentioning the hashtag, the faster the virtual plane flew and progress of these races could be tracked on a dedicated website.
tweets over the peak time between 12pm and 4pm. A quarter of tweets about the Dreamliner were positive and a fifth mentioned the word ‘love’. The race was replayed 5 days later , on a flight between London and Los Angeles to support BA’s recent A380 launch to Los Angeles with contestants being able to win tickets to the West Coast metropolis. Both races were won by the ‘Tweetliner’ , and according to social analytics company Topsy, there were over 30,000 tweets with the #RaceThePlane hashtag in 30 days.
According to Carat , the first #RaceThePlane race reached approximately 1.9 million Twitter users and pulled in 6,000
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EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL DIGITAL TRADITIONAL
