benchmark report
airline marketing
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.
APR 2016 ISSUE
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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EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL DIGITAL TV, PRINT, OOH
