SAS - THE ARRIVALS

There are a number of different routes you can go down, when building a brand for your airline. You can lead on the quality of service, and how you are different from the competition - see the latest Emirates campaign in this issue as an example.

You can create campaigns where you try to associate yourself with your home country - e.g the British Airways campaign where they explained Britishness to Americans, or the many successful stopover campaigns by Icelandair. You can do something around heritage, for example the Vistara retrojet (see this episode of the SimpliLive show for more).

You can promote the breadth of your network and how you make the world a smaller place - United, which we covered in this issue is doing exactly that with its latest campaign ‘World Orchestra.’

Or, you can actually try to own what you might call the human dimension of travel. People’s stories, how travel is life changing.

Lufthansa did this very well in its “Say yes to the World” campaign we featured in March, while Russian Airline S7 adopted a similar tack with its “The Best Planet” and “I am You” campaigns - both previous AMM cover stories.

Scandinavian Airline SAS has likewise chosen to lead on the human side of travel, with its latest campaign called “The Arrivals”, which focuses on what happens in the arrivals hall of airports.

The Arrivals is the latest in a series of campaigns around a master SAS theme called ‘We are travelers’, which was launched in 2014. According to SAS, the idea is to look at “the positive emotions associated with flying.”

Last year for example, the concept was brought to life through a spot called ‘Travelers are the future’, where a young school girl imagines a career of fame and fortune and is transported to various destinations while daydreaming in her classroom.

Produced by Danish advertising agency “& Co”, The Arrivals is a short video

showing passengers coming out through airport arrivals doors and greeting loved ones. But it’s much more than an ad, the film captures real human experiences.

That’s because SAS hired acclaimed photographer Peter Funch and filmmaker Jeppe Rønde to spend a week at Kastrup International Airport in Copenhagen. They worked with both actors but also real “chance encounters” that they captured just at the right moment.

The film, campaign imagery and narration are really powerful in conveying the emotions involved when you clear customs and find friends or loved ones waiting for you. As a piece of film making and story-telling it really works.

The video is then backed up with a microsite featuring a survey carried out among Scandinavians on how travel changes you.

For us, this is where the campaign is a bit weaker, as it seems to deviate from the theme of the arrivals experience and turns into a much more generic ‘travel changes you’ kind of message.

For example, the finding that heavy travelers are more creative, politically interested and open to helping society may well be true, but surely that statistic could just as well lend itself to a campaign called “The Departures” as opposed to “The Arrivals.”

In fact, the review of the ad in the Chicago Business Journal by Lewis Lazare sums it up well. Lazare calls ‘The Arrivals’ “beautifully simple yet deeply affecting”, and we’d completely agree.

Lazare then says that the backstories of the travelers are not spelt out - which surely is an opportunity, you could create a whole campaign around people’s stories when they arrive, and how they either reconnect with loved ones or arrive somewhere new.

You could also create a whole PR package around the fact that an acclaimed film-maker and photographer spent time in CPH trying to capture moments. What did they observe, what are their perceptions of spending so much time at the airport?

However, the fact remains that as a standalone piece of storytelling it is excellent. It manages to be moving, it doesn’t try and shoe-horn in too many commercial messages into the film, it shows a wide variety of passengers arriving and the hook of getting a filmmaker and a photographer to actually spend a week in Copenhagen Airport to capture the arrivals experience is a good one.

As Ad Week says in its review, SAS manages to capture “the pure joy and love of the arrivals hall.” In fact Ad Week points out that the new SAS campaign is not unlike the opening scene of the now polarising Richard Curtis ‘rom-com’ film Love Actually.

As Ad Week senior editor Doug Zanger says, that opening sequence is the one part of the 2003 film which holds up well today - in it a Hugh Grant voiceover says that there is a lot of “love actually” in the world, as the clip shows passengers streaming into the arrivals hall of London Heathrow Airport.

And like in the SAS ad “Arrivals”, director Richard Curtis tried to capture ‘spontaneous’ moments (in his case by setting up hidden cameras in Heathrow).