benchmark report
airline marketing
check in anywhere
bizmatch by vueling
KULULA.COM
Noticing how most South Africans are happy booking their f lights online but apprehensive when it comes to checkingin online, kulula.com and its agency looked to come up with a creative way of informing people, who were unnecessarily queuing at the airpor t check-in counters, that it would be much faster and more convenient to rather just skip the queue and check-in online from anywhere, i.e. the comfor t of their own home, bed, couch, off ice, or deck chair. In the campaign, travellers at Cape Town and Johannesburg airpor ts were surprised by local celebrities Siv Ngesi (actor and comedian) and Jack Parow (rapper) who made an appearance in motorized baths and beds. Decked out with kulula.com branding, these unexpected check-in locations drove around the crowds at the airpor t, making JANUARY 2015 ISSUE
VUELING
a statement about just how easy it can be to check-in with kulula.com. Comments kulula.com’s ad agency King James: “Selling the idea to kulula.com was actually pretty easy. Most conventional airlines would just put up an instructional message on a poster or banner, but (for tunately for us) kulula.com doesn’t really do normal.” “So when we told them that we wanted to put their online check-in message on a bath, and then put that bath on wheels, and enable it to move around with a remote control – they were in from the get-go. Convincing an airpor t to let you drive around in a bed and bath for a couple weeks obviously required a bit more effor t.” Video and images of the campaign here and here .
Pioneered by Silicon Valley-favourite Virgin America, more and more airlines are aligning themselves with creative and tech entrepreneurs as part of efforts to target a new class of ‘smart’ business travellers. Examples include Delta’s ‘Innovation Class’ , a mentorship program that invites up-andcoming entrepreneurs to apply for a seat on a flight next to business leaders in a variety of fields en route to select events. Turkish Airlines’ ‘Invest On Board’ program streams pitch videos from startups to the in-seat screens of passengers in Business Class, providing participating startups with a captive audience for their pitches. The most recent iniative comes from Spanish LCC Vueling who teamed with Italian entrepreneurial association Assolombarda to organise the Bizmatch by Vueling inflight event in which 100 Spanish and Italian
entrepreneurs teamed up to develop new business concepts onboard an A320 flying between Milan and Barcelona. The inflight ‘micro event’ was the ending of the Social 2 Business conference held in Milan and in which all the participants had been involved. During the flight, the participants – who were divided into 18 teams – had to choose which category they wanted to work on and work together to create a business concept. The winning concepts were ‘Massive on Air Courses’ (making use of a journey to take inflight courses), Car Swap (leaving your car at the airport to let someone else use it while away), and ‘The Aviators’ (an app that helps travellers organise their trip by putting them in touch with other travellers making the same journey).
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EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL DIGITAL TV, PRINT, OOH
