Virgin America - Blah Airlines

Virgin America - Blah Airlines

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 .