benchmark report
airline marketing
APR 2016 ISSUE
A monthly selection of the most innovative marketing campaigns launched by airlines around the world SimpliFlying April 2OI6
Issue 43
benchmark report
airline marketing
welcome. Published by aviation marketing strategy consulting firm SimpliFlying, the Airline Marketing Benchmark Repor t contains a wide range of airline marketing case studies each month, providing you with the latest and most innovative social, digital, experiential and traditional airline marketing campaigns recently launched by airlines around the world. Whether you’re looking for inspiration or are eager to help your airline move into the nex t stage of engagement, while also understanding how your airline marketing initiatives compare to campaigns from competitors in general, these repor ts are indispensable for airline professionals working in the f ield of marketing and corporate communications. The monthly repor ts also help agencies that work with airlines stay on top of the latest innovative airline marketing initiatives.
APR 2016 ISSUE
EXPERIENTIAL
For any questions about the repor t, please contact Shubhodeep Pal at shubhodeep@simplif lying.com. As innovative campaigns come in all shapes and sizes, the Airline Marketing Benchmark Repor t is categorized into the following four themes:
Faced with ever more experienced consumers, who routinely ignore the commercials and ads thrown at them, airline brands are finding new ways to break through the adver tising clutter to connect with consumers.
SOCIAL
Besides engaging their online audience via Facebook and Twitter-based campaigns, the airline industry is also busy experimenting with new social media platforms.
DIGITAL
With the huge popularity of smar tphones and tablets, airlines are tapping into these digital platforms to engage consumers, as well as releasing videos online which they hope will go viral.
TV, PRINT, OOH
Despite the current focus on social, digital and experiential campaigns, airlines continue to serve up creative, traditional media-based, initiatives in order to reach a mass audience.
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benchmark report
airline marketing
experiential
reach across the aisle
international women’s day
JETBLUE To coincide with the US Presidential election season kicking off, JetBlue chose to promote unity and healthy public discourse by offering to give a planeful of passengers a free round-trip ticket to their choice of JetBlue holiday destinations. The catch? They had to “reach across the aisle” to agree on the places they’d like to visit. This promotion was ideally timed given the divisive nature of the U.S. Presidential campaigns. “Can 150 strangers do something that Washington struggles to do? Work together,” the airline asked. Tim Vaccarino, excecutive creative director of JetBlue’s agency, MullenLowe, told Adweek . “This being one of the most polarizing political climates in history, we saw an oppor tunity to make a comment about what’s truly possible when we all work together.”
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ROYAL BRUNEI AIRLINES After speeches, deliberations, and civilized debates, the passengers ultimately voted in favor of visiting Costa Rica. JetBlue made a video of the event which notched up over one million views on YouTube. JetBlue also shared the video on its Facebook page where it garnered over 13,000 likes.
A number of airlines celebrated International Women’s Day this year with flights operated by all-female crews. Air India, for example, had the longest flight in the world ever operated by an all-female crew between Delhi and San Francisco .
celebrated Kiwi travel blog Stuff.com. nz and long-running frequent flyer blog boardingarea.com . The flight was also a huge PR success for Royal Brunei on social media where a celebrated PR photo of the all-female flight crew in the cockpit was shared and liked for weeks afterwards.
This is not the first time that JetBlue used a little politics in a promotion. During the 2012 Presidential Election, JetBlue played off claims by some of the electorate that they’d leave the country if their candidate did not win by gifting one-way tickets to “winning” members of the losing par ty.
However, none of the all-female flights received as much attention as the one by an all-female crew at Royal Brunei Airlines. Timed to coincide with Brunei’s National Day, which is actually just prior to International Women’s Day, the event proved to be even more ground-breaking owing to the fact that the flight touched down in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where women are not even allowed to drive a car.
Aside from making a huge splash on Twitter and Instagram where the hashtags #RBbetterfly and #royalbruneiairlines performed very strongly, the pic has also garnered 35,617 (and counting!) “likes” on Royal Brunei’s Facebook page . It has also no doubt inspired thousands of women and young girls the world over to dream bigger.
JetBlue’s “reach across the aisle” campaign caught the attention of major U.S. television networks , and publications like Fortune , AdAge and Mashable .
The initiative gathered massive amounts of attention from media outlets the world over including the Daily Mail , Independent
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benchmark report
airline marketing
love on first flight
project skyway
NORWEGIAN In a clever reversal of the now iconic “Sin City” tourism slogan “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” Norwegian brought the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas to Stockholm via a colorful, cheeky campaign called “Love on First Flight”. “Elvis Presley” was beamed live direct from the historic Little White Chapel in Las Vegas, into a crowded Stockholm shopping mall. The very convincing Elvis impersonator offered to marry curious shoppers on the spot. The bold and daring few who took him up on the offer won a free all-inclusive round trip ticket to fun-filled Las Vegas for their honeymoon! Following the newly married couples with a camera crew on their epic honeymoon adventures in Las Vegas – where the
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HONG KONG AIRLINES blushing bride and groom were wined and dined at various top-notch casinos and even whisked off on a breathtaking helicopter tour of Nevada’s historic Hoover Dam – Norwegian’s lively and very spirited video spot of the event has already racked up an impressive 380K hits on YouTube in just over a month. Highlighting Norwegian’s new non-stop service from Stockholm to Las Vegas, the fun, buzz-wor thy campaign has also generated much praise online from travel and marketing blogs as well as marketing industry journal Ad Week .
This year, Hong Kong Airlines is celebrating its 10 th anniversary. One of the main highlights of the anniversary festivities is a uniform design competition open to the public. The “Project Skyway” competition opened to entries on March 15th with the launch of a microsite (Chinese and English) that delivers all necessary background, application, and judging information to hopefuls – as well as a detailed assignment brief. Entrants are charged with submitting six designs online: one male and one female for the airline’s three tiers of flight crew. Uniform designs are to “embody the essence of Hong Kong”, by combining unique creative elements and accessories, plus a few staple items that must adhere to airline specifications. Five shortlisted proposals (sketch portfolios) will enter into a public catwalk and allowances will be granted for production. A judging
panel will assess the showcased designs, plus staff and pubic voting will determine a winning concept; after which the new crew uniforms will be modelled. The winner also gets a cash prize of HK$20,000, a commemorative certificate and a Business Class round trip to Japan. Hong Kong is a city with millions of young people, a vast number of whom are inclined toward graphic design, fashion design and the art scene in general. Hong Kong’s designers have been gaining traction internationally for many years. In a press release about the competition, Hong Kong Airlines Director of Service Deliver, Stanley Kan, said that Project Skyway aims to support local creative industries and give fashion design upstarts an opportunity to gain practical experience for a career springboard into fashion design.
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benchmark report
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social
air france perspectives
snake away dance sale
AIR FRANCE Celebrating the debut of Air France’s new travel website, Travel by Air France , the carrier recently launched an innovative online photo competition called “Perspectives” . Designed to showcase the best, brightest and above all else, the most authentic images from Air France destinations from around the world, the contest encouraged travellers to submit digital pics of their favourite out-of-the-way restaurants; hidden gem hotels and/or other unique landmarks in their favorite cities, tagged with the hashtag #travelbyairfrance. Hoping to spur traffic to the new Travel by Air France website, which features regularly-updated travel information and photos from an ever-expanding global network of journalists, “travelistas,” and e-influencers, the contest also served as a fun, innovative way to celebrate favorite locales through photography. APR 2016 ISSUE
RYANAIR Web users were then encouraged to vote for the public prize online which would grant 100 lucky winners the chance to have their photos displayed in a gallery in Paris, and potentially in Air France’s Business Class lounge at the Paris Charles de Gaulle airpor t.
In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day and promoting a flash sale (in which seats out of Dublin were selling for as little as €9.99), Ireland’s cheekiest airline ran a shor t and sweet social media campaign which called upon fans to show off their Irish dancing skills for a chance to win airline tickets.
The March 16th video was viewed 74,000 times on Facebook. On March 17th (St. Patrick’s Day), a second video was posted to remind people of the contest. This one showed CEO Michael O’Leary doing his own dance and it was viewed 13,000 times on Facebook.
Judging the final winners was an eclectic jury featuring renowned French photographer Stéphane de Bourgies and César Award-winning actress Sandrine Kiberlain .
On March 16th, Ryanair uploaded two videos featuring Irish dancing at an airpor t. The first one was professionally filmed and shared through various platforms. It adver tised the flash sale and wished everyone a happy St. Patrick’s Day.
One winner was selected randomly from Facebook and one from Twitter. Both were announced March 18, and each won two flight vouchers good for 12 months.
Capturing the attention of a number of travel and lifestyle blogs like the French the language OHLALAIR.COM campaign’s winning pic, a truly unique perspective of the Eiffel Tower, also garnered close to 7,000 likes on Instagram .
The same day, another video surfaced on Facebook and Twitter in which a Ryanair staffer danced an Irish jig through the airline’s main offices. At the bottom corner of the shor t video was the hashtag #RivAirDance, and the text above the video read: “COMPETITION! Send us YOUR best”.
The promotion itself was extensively covered in the Irish media -- for example, in the Irish Independent .
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pay for yourself, not everyone else
#SwipeRightNZ
HK EXPRESS
AIR NEW ZEALAND Last month, we featured several Valentine’s Day promotions. Here is another great one from Air New Zealand that, uniquely for an airline, made use of the dating social network “Tinder”.
Air New Zealand had factored this in by linking the different Tinder profiles with its own social media pages , encouraging people to share the different entries and chat up lines .
Profiles were created for six aircraft (three male / three female) with the public asked to #SwipeRightNZ -- with the best pick-up lines going into a draw to win flights.
In the end, Air New Zealand netted 160k impressions on Twitter, a reach of over half a million on Facebook with almost 20,000 engagements. There were additionally thousands of entries across Air New Zealand’s social networks, as well as on Tinder itself.
Those flight prizes in turn matched where each plane was flying to. This was a clever piece of guerrilla marketing, where Tinder wasn’t in on the act. Indeed, Air New Zealand’s profiles were disabled on average 14 hours after they were first uploaded, with five of the six planes ultimately being kicked off the social network.
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Poking fun at the secret charges hidden in the airfares of many full-service airlines, trendsetting, low-cost carrier HK Express recently launched a cheeky campaign entitled “Pay for Yourself, Not Everyone Else.” using the hashtag #HKExpress. The brainchild of the award-winning creatives at Leo Burnett Shanghai the campaign sought to highlight the fact that most passengers unwittingly pay for amenities that they never personally use or even want by paying higher fares. Aimed squarely at passengers in mainland China, the centerpiece of HK Express’ campaign is a hilarious, hidden camera-style video clip with a pushy young woman licking the ice cream cones of unsuspecting customers in a convenience store, essentially taking something that someone else has paid for.
Going out of their way to court budgetconscious mainland flyers, particularly in the increasingly affluent Pearl Delta Region of Southern China, the HK Express clips put a madcap spin on the ridiculousness of paying extra for a stranger’s comfort while also assuring travellers that they will never encounter anything similar on an HK Express flight. While humorous campaigns like this are nothing new to HK Express, which launched a popular plane naming contest with a dim sum theme in 2013, the current campaign garnered the carrier stellar writeups on popular marketing websites such as and Marketing Campaign Brief Asia Magazine and has also helped HK Express pass the 500K fan mark on the carrier’s official Facebook page .
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benchmark report
airline marketing
digital
flights with bennies
the safetys DELTA Delta Airlines took advantage of the massive online audience around the Academy Awards (“Oscars”) to call attention to its impor tant safety messages on board. The airline recognized the cast of its various creative in-flight safety videos in a special awards “show” of its own called “The Safetys” which ran live on a dedicated feed on Twitter with the hashtag #SAFETYS .
VIRGIN AMERICA prestigious honor – a SAFETY award – in recognition of their excellence in onboard safety,” said Julieta McCurry, Delta’s General Manager–Brand Communications. “Safety is our top priority, and our distinguished honorees represent an exceptional commitment to the safety of our customers and employees.”
The airline followed the popular “Oscars” show format, with red carpet interviews of some of the nominees, clips of nominee performances, and of course giving out of the big awards--special silver trophies with a Delta plane.
The airline also posted a YouTube video summary of the winners which garnered over 800,000 views. Screaming Goat , who won a Safety Lifetime Achievement Award for discouraging flyers from smoking onboard, did not eat his trophy, which everyone was pretty happy about.
“We hope our customers will continue to pay attention to our impor tant safety messages as we look back at some of our favorite safety video moments of the last few years and bestow upon them our most
Delta has been bold about its safety videos, directly appealing to a social media audience. Its Internetest safety video from May of last year got over 9.6 million views.
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Virgin America has launched a new “Flights with Bennies” promotional campaign encouraging travellers to ‘break up’ with their current airline loyalty programs in exchange for what it terms a more ‘beneficial,’ relationship with Virgin America. The campaign plays off common relationship problems and the idea of “friends with benefits” (‘bennies’) suggesting there’s no “point” being tied to an inferior offer to earn a few miles. Instead, the airline suggests customers get what they need--members or not--while promoting Virgin America’s point-based Elevate frequent flyer program. New members get 500 Elevate points for signing up for Elevate during the “Flights with Bennies” campaign. Stuar t Dinnis, Director of Loyalty at Virgin America said of the campaign : “Flyers
appreciate our innovative approach to travel – from our loyalty program to our website to our onboard experience. Now we’re giving them a chance to break up with that old airline that doesn’t treat them well, and instead put the magic back in the flying experience by choosing Virgin America.” Virgin also encourages new Elevate members to send a message to friends on social media suggesting it’s time to ‘move on’ by sharing their reasons for breaking up with their former airline with pre-written “breakup” cards. “Dear Plane Peanuts, You can’t satisfy me. I’m leaving you for Bennies so I can get spoiled on demand,” one says. The airline shared the campaign on social media with the hashtag #FlightswithBennies .
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vueling app fast and simple
football safety videos
VUELING Vueling put its new mobile app through a death defying test in a new video campaign showing how easily any flyer can book a flight--even a sky jumper. The stuntman who tested the app made his flight arrangements in 52 seconds before deploying his parachute and the video shows his jump side-by-side with a meter measuring the time passing as well as a live screen image of the mobile reservations menu. The airline also ran a promotion asking Facebook followers to share their own onthe-fly reservations experiences using the Vueling app, with a chance to win a flight for two to their choice of Vueling’s destinations. The winner posted: “I can make a flight reservation on the side while I take care of the list of 3.737.383.839 things my darling boss left me to take care of (and while imagining my
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EMIRATES guy and I flying to a marvellous destination to enjoy a mini-vacation).” This app-test stunt promotion was ideally timed around Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, for which the airline also added 63 flights to meet demand. In 2011, Hotels.com ran a similar test of its app (video) in a “X-treme booking” promotion, which featured a stuntman jumping out of a plane with a camera on his helmet recording the bookings process. Vueling’s side-by-side display made it easier to see the reservations process, with both stunts serving as stellar high-stress UI (user interface) tests.
What gets people’s attention in a world saturated by marketing messages? One thing that cer tainly works is taking something very familiar and bringing it out of its usual contex t for a humorous jolt.
At the halfway point in a recent HSV/ Bayern Munich game, eight Emirates cabin crew marched onto the pitch in two rows, while the Emirates logo displayed across the stadium big-screen.
According to Dubai-based brand analyst Omar Ismail, that’s exactly what Emirates has done with the release of its second “football safety video” f ilmed on the pitch at Hamburg’s Voksparkstadion (home of HSV Hamburg) in Germany.
At f irst, the stunt looked as though it would be a carbon copy the last Emirates “football safety video”, f ilmed at Benf ica’s Estadio da Luz in Lisbon. However, this routine took it a step fur ther when the crew members (dressed in long crew jackets, hats and gloves) quickly shifted from a mock safety demonstration into exper t ball-handling and fancy footwork – scoring goals and sending the crowd wild. Between March 3rd and 30th, HSV/ Emirates Safety Video got 458,000 views on YouTube , 1.4 million views and 23,000 shares on Facebook , and the #HelloHamburg hashtag associated with the video is still generating tons of traff ic on other platforms .
“One key element of comedy is subver ting expectations,” he told popular UAE news website UAEinteract.com “So here we have two things that are well known, but in the wrong contex t. Everyone knows the f light attendant routine, and seeing it being applied in a place you don’t expect is where the comedy comes from.”
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benchmark report
airline marketing
tv, print, ooh
we prove it different
fantasy flight THOMAS COOK AIRLINES and Together with Catch Digital Visualise (a collective of 3D f ilmmakers), Thomas Cook Airlines has executed a fun and creative campaign that utilizes the latest in 3D f ilm technology and the power of YouTube, all while promoting new long-haul routes and a newly refurbished f leet of A330 aircraft. The campaign is a contest where par ticipants can win an all expenses-paid trip to LA. Experienced on mobile devices via the YouTube app, viewers watch a series of live-action cabin videos (viewed nearly four million times in three weeks) and change their perspective by moving their device or dragging the screen. Real pilots and cabin crew can be seen going about their tasks onboard, while actors playing different characters in the plane give clues about three mystery destinations. For example, in this video APR 2016 ISSUE
AEROMEXICO we see actors dressed as celebrities Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who live in New York. This suggests that one of the three mystery cities is New York.
Aeromexico has tackled stereotypes and common misconceptions with its lively “We Prove It Different” campaign produced by Ogilvy & Mather, Mexico.
If the user explores the 3D videos thoroughly, learning all three mystery destinations, they can enter the sweepstakes online via a special Fantasy Flight micro-site. In addition to the grand prize LA adventure, Thomas Cook will also give away two sets of long-haul tickets and f ive 3D cameras.
The ad campaign consists of vignettes which consider traditional myths about destinations, cultures, and services which Aeromexico wants to help people break. It features television and radio spots, print ads, and billboards. Aeromexico will gradually include different types of ads and graphic materials.
Visualise says that Thomas Cook’s last VR destination campaign, ‘Try Before You Fly’ , led to a 180% increase in NYC excursions booked.
The airline has been fearless about taking on what some might consider no-go topics, like: “All you go to Amsterdam for is to smoke pot.” .
The campaign is suppor ted by the hashtag #TCAFantasyFlight, which has been very active on Twitter .
In the YouTube video of the campaign, the airline juxtaposes other common stereotypes like, “Mexicans are macho” with images that prove differently, such as
a Mexican man doing the dishes at home. Less controversial topics dispel destination myths, like “You can only go to Cancun for Spring Break” and experiential myths like “when you fly all you get for free is water.” Andrés Castañeda, Deputy Director of E-Commerce Marketing Strategies explains the philosophy behind the campaign saying, “Aeromexico is a global airline that serves different countries across the globe, and is proud to serve the diverse customers who fly with us. Our goal with this campaign is to encourage travellers to reassess different destinations. In other words, we don’t want them to simply settle for what they hear about these places, but want them to personally visit and experience them so they can form their own opinions.” The airline has also promoted the campaign on Social Media with the label “Rompiendo Mitos” (Breaking Myths).
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mariela’s dream LAN Five years ago, LAN airlines launched a campaign, “Kids that dream, kids that fly,” that brings children from poorer, remote areas of Peru to the capital Lima. The idea is that LAN is giving children the chance to “dream” by flying for the first time . An ad created by McCann in Lima tells the story of one of these children, a girl called Mariela who lives in a remote Andean mountain village . Mariela’s dream is to “sing in the clouds” , and the spot captures both her reaction when on board an aircraft for the first time, as well as the hear t-warming moment when all her friends on board sing along with her. Ad Week calls it ‘adorable’, praising the LAN spot for its “storybook arc and gorgeous camerawork” .
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The proof however is in the results: After a week of being published on the official LAN Peru YouTube Channel, the film gathered over one million views . The ad is effective because it manages to both promote a valuable CSR initiative by LAN and introduce it to the public, while also getting across the childlike joy and magic many experience when flying. According to Mauricio Fernandez Maldonado, chief creative officer of McCann Lima, “We were looking to introduce this programme to the general audience, through a positive and motivational message. Because, while sometimes it seems that a dream can never come true, if you believe in it, and won’t let it go, you will always find a couple of wings that can help you reach your dreams” .
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SimpliFlying is a global consultancy that believes in thinking differently about aviation marketing. Having worked with over 50 airlines and airports around the world, it has presences in Singapore, UK, Spain, Canada and India. Today, SimpliFlying advises airlines and airports on customer engagement strategy, achieving aviation business goals by harnessing the latest innovations in the social media space.
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