British Airways - #racetheplane

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.

According to Carat , the first #RaceThePlane race reached approximately 1.9 million Twitter users and pulled in 6,000 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.