benchmark report
airline marketing
inflight cinema
the escalator experiment
LOT AEarlier in May – to the delight of some for tunate cinema fans – LOT Polish Airlines transformed a movie theatre into a vir tual business class experience, promoting the perks of its premium product. As people filtered in to grab a seat for a newly-released comedy, they noticed there was something different about this movie theatre at Cinema City in Warsaw. The front row of seats (typically the most unattractive in a movie theatre) were made positively alluring. Fully equipped with the airline’s premium cabin comfor ts and amenities, each front row seat boasted a soft pillow, warm blanket and fresh blue headrest cover emblazoned with LOT’s logo and the words “Business Class”. As the lights went down in the theatre, moving projections replicated Boeing 787 Dreamliner windows and the sky beyond along the side walls of the theatre. On the large centre screen, a video shot inside JUNE 2015 ISSUE
SAS one of these aircraft helped moviegoers feel even more as though they were in the premium section of a LOT Dreamliner cabin. The same crew from the video then appeared in the theatre, serving an amuse bouche (with trolley and trays) from LOT’s Business Class menu to the first row. While those in the first row were experiencing the menu, the rest of the audience were invited to quickly take a picture and post it to the LOT’s Facebook page. The first three to do so were given Premium Economy tickets. In addition to getting good mileage on Instagram , a video made to capture the special experience had received more than 18,000 views and tons of shares by LOT’s strong Facebook following.
Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has taken an experiental approach (both in real-life as well as digitally) in communicating its new A330 cabin interior and the passenger experience it offers on the ground. Following the contrails of its Comfy Challenge sleep competition (featured in last month’s report), SAS has put passengers’ need for speed to the test with a social experiment carried out at Stockholm Arlanda airport. The airline rigged an escalator to move at a snail’s pace, leaving the one besides it to run at a faster pace, and recorded passengers’ choices and reactions—all to answer the question: do passengers choose a faster track? The Candid Camera-like comical results are shown in the airline’s YouTube video .
Salon de Mobile , and partnered with Google Streetview to let the general public experience its refreshed A330s in a digital way. Th 360-degree Google Streetview tour of the aircraft interior, lets visitors explore and focus on features which interest them most. High-resolution images let visitors get close enough to find USB outlets on seats and identify the colour of the earphones in economy—light blue. To enhance the engagement of this virtual-reality tour, SAS added map flags which visitors can click, to learn more about select features, and a clickto-book prompt. SAS complemented the digital initiative with a Google Streetview of its lounge at Copenhagen Airport.
In another experiential initiative, SAS took its new A330 seats on show to Milan, at the
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EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL DIGITAL TV, PRINT, OOH
