benchmark report
airline marketing
australia’s biggest foodie
spencer
VIRGIN AUSTRALIA Airlines have been teaming up with celebrity chefs and world class restauranteurs to bring culinary delights to their passengers for years, but Virgin Australia has taken the celebrity chef par tnership to new heights with their recent search for Australia’s Biggest Foodie . Together with popular resident chef and award-winning Australian restauranteur Luke Mangan , Virgin Australia went on a quest to discover the country’s finest ar tisan food producers, food bloggers and social media whizzes. Now, from a shor tlist of top foodie talent, Mangan and Virgin Australia will together select a “CEO” (Culinary Experience Officer) who will land the role of a lifetime. The contest winner will join Mangan on luxurious Eastern & Oriental Express rail journeys, develop content and repor t on Mangan’s por tfolio, take a Hamilton Island P&O cruise, dine in Mangan’s restaurants in Asia and the Maldives, and of course MAY 2016 ISSUE
KLM experience Virgin Australia Business class. Winning contestants will also have their ar tisan food products showcased on Virgin Australia’s Business Class menu for an entire season. With airline and celebrity chef par tnerships of this type only gaining in popularity with passengers and foodies sharing their culinary adventures like never before on dedicated social media hubs like FoodNiche and Food Gawker expect to see many more cheeky, social media-fueled contests of this sor t moving forward. Already generating massive buzz online, Virgin Australia’s innovative par tnership with Mangan has been written up on ETB Travel News Australia , TimeOut Sydney , Yahoo7 Travel and Lifestyle Food Australia . The contest kickedoff with a shor t video featuring Mangan himself, and it was viewed nearly 2.2K times on the Virgin Australia Facebook page .
KLM’s home hub, Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, is one of the largest and busiest in Europe – and the majority of its traffic comes from connecting passengers. Helping these passengers get quickly through various security zones and to their next flight is paramount to the success of both the airpor t and airlines, like KLM, that use it. Taking this challenge seriously and looking for sustainable flow management solutions, KLM and a consortium of international research par tners (funded by the European Union) are on a mission to find out if a smar t robot named SPENCER could be par t of the answer. Following three years of careful development, SPENCER was recently put to work Schiphol airpor t, where he completed testing with tasks like scanning boarding passes and guiding KLM passengers to their
gate. Now, the consor tium par tners will use real passenger feedback to improve SPENCER going forward. From a purely marketing perspective, the cute and helpful robot (decked out in KLM blue) can’t help but turn heads. People are inherently drawn to fascinating technology and it doesn’t get much more fascinating than a fully autonomous robot navigating his way through a busy airpor t. By getting involved in robotics, KLM also shows itself to be on the leading edge of technology. SPENCER has been the subject of repor ts by countless news outlets, and this video released March 30 by KLM (with more than 15,000 views on YouTube and over 800,000 on Facebook) shows just how much love he gets from curious and camera-happy travellers.
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EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL DIGITAL TV, PRINT, OOH
