Delta - Delta #GiftGuide

Delta - Delta #GiftGuide

One of the reasons people love social media is the way it allows them to aggregate and experience content in digestible snippets. But once an airline masters the art of condensing its marketing message into one image, a cool hashtags or 140 clever characters – what comes next?

Now that many airlines have gotten the hang of social media, more and more are thinking outside the box. This is precisely the case with Delta’s recent Holiday #GiftGuide campaign, which shows us a novel technique for expanding beyond perceived limitations of Instagram, a powerfully visual social platform.

An Instagram profile or homepage displays an account name and short introduction at the top, followed below by a tiled arrangement of photo uploads that’s three images wide and any conceivable length (this is dependent on the number of upload the account has). This profile design is identical for corporate entities and the environment is ripe for reinvention.

Described by the APEX blog as a “marketing matryoshka”, the recent Delta Gift Guide on Instagram uses a picture slicing technique to transform a large single image (in this case a flow-chart to the perfect gift) into an arrangement of separate images. Together, these separate images form a mosaic that fills the whole screen, but where each one of 18 pictures can be clicked and expanded individually.

Want to try it out? There are a number of simple and free image division and collage-making applications (for example Giant Square for iOS) available in all the popular app stores.