benchmark report
airline marketing
blah airlines
digital
we are travelers SAS
SAS has launched a new marketing platform, called ‘We Are Travelers’ , which consists of an adver tising campaign and a broader digital content push by SAS that will see greater emphasis on the airline’s own digital content and channels. The marketing campaign has star ted with an emotional film that uses portraits of real customers and employees, showing that there are many different kinds of travellers that all have something in common – they love to travel and they do it a lot. The campaign has been launched on TV, in print , online and via outdoor adver tising in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. As par t of the new ‘We Are Travelers’ platform SAS is saying goodbye to its current Scanorama inflight magazine and is instead launching a “new editorial concept”
NOVEMBER 2014 ISSUE
VIRGIN AMERICA
called Scandinavian Traveler which consists of a new on-board magazine, website, web TV, social media content and newsletters. Says Stefan Hedelius, vice president brand and marketing at SAS: “We get over 100 million hits on our website every year and every day 80,000 people travel with us. We want to offer them high-quality content that inspires and informs, through the channels that are most suitable at the time, both before, during and after their trip.” […] “We are adopting an ambitious focus on content through our new concept with the aim is to create reading material and movies that reach a wide audience. SAS is in a high-interest industry, where wellproduced content is becoming increasingly impor tant.”
Virgin America has created a curious 5 hours and 46 minutes-long commercial, which offers a real-time look at a New York Newark to San Francisco flight within the beige confines of the fictional BLAH Airlines . BLAH is positioned as the antithesis of Virgin. The seats are cramped, the lighting is harsh, there’s scant entertainment and no real food. As well as being mind-numbingly uneventful, the film – which generated nearly 700,000 (partly) views so far on YouTube – at times is also quite unsettling, featuring lingering shots of bleary-eyed mannequins and circular whispered conversations. Says Virgin Atlantic: “On rival flights like the fictional ‘BLAH Airlines’, passengers have no choice but to be on ‘autopilot’ to get through
the tedious journey. Just trying to watch the video is downright painful—and that’s the point. If you wouldn’t sit through the entire film, why would you pay money to experience it in real life?” Adds Bryan Houlette, creative director on the Virgin America account at the airline’s ad agency Eleven, “People have a hard time sitting through five seconds of pre-roll on YouTube and we were interested to see how will they react to almost six hours of it— much of which is intentionally, preposterously, stultifyingly boring.” The campaign also includes a social media push on Twitter and Instagram . A detailed description of the campaign’s elements here .
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EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL DIGITAL TV, PRINT, OOH
