benchmark report
airline marketing theme of the month
april fools
braai in the sky KULULA.COM
yogazone SCOOT
Given the timezone that Scoot is in (GMT+8), they were the first airline in the world this year to launch an April Fools’ Day campaign. An email with the subject, “S-t-r-e-t-c-h out in the Scoot YogaZone” was sent out to its whole database, and photos featuring rather attractive yoga instructors in skimpy clothes posted on Facebook and other channels. The airline announced that it was going to offer hot yoga classes on board their flights from Singapore to Hong Kong, including raising the cabin temperature to 40.6 degrees Celsius for the Bikram Yoga enthusiasts. APRIL 2014 ISSUE
South African LCC kulula.com announced it will bring barbecue-style cooking to the skies, with dishes freshly prepared on board. Kulula’s announcement on their Facebook page seems to have confused quite a number of people as well, which goes to show how convincingly they worded their announcement : “A pilot study braai-flight will be conducted in the skies to determine the possibility of offering customers a braai catering option on board. If successful, going forward customers travelling on kulula.com will be able to select their favourite piece of braai meat or vegetable skewer from the cabin crew and have it braaied in mid-air.” And what was initially labelled an April Fools’ Day joke, actually became a first for kulula. com, when the airline attempted the first ever braai in the sky in a hot-air balloon (video ).
total temperature control VIRGIN AMERICA
In true Virgin style, Richard Branson proudly announced on YouTube that Virgin America would like to give more control to the passengers of their flying experience, by introducing Total Temperature Control (TTC). This would allows travelers to create their own personal climate controlled environment thanks to Nest thermostats built into Virgin America’s in-flight entertainment systems. Options to set your climate control include ‘Chicago Polar Vortex’ and ‘NYC Subway Sweaty’. On the landing page for the announcement, there’s even a poll where anyone could participate and share what their preference would be on-board.
metric time WESTJET
Westjet April Fool’s joke saw the airline taking over the YouTube Canada homepage, announcing that the airline will be moving to Metric time, where instead of AM and PM, flight times will be displayed in milliminutes (a rather novel invention). There was a YouTube video , and a rather complex calculation explaining the conversion. The most hilarious aspect was that they even hinted that a smartphone app would be able to do the conversion. While not as charming as Kargo Kids that they launched last year, we will be keen to see how viral this video goes, and whether it crosses the one million mark for ticket sales this year (they have done so previously).
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EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL DIGITAL TRADITIONAL
