benchmark report
airline marketing
five hour stopover challenge
magic on board
FINNAIR Finnair is one of the airlines featured in SimpliFlying CEO Shashank Nigam’s new book ‘SOAR’ , in par ticular for its success in positioning itself as a bridge to and from the Far East via Helsinki. In recent years Finnair has extended this idea in two ways. It has built its brand among Asian travellers wanting to fly West. And it has promoted Finland as a stopover destination in its own right, with a dedicated micro-site suggesting ideas ranging from a visit to an ‘ice sauna’ to a trip to see the Nor thern Lights. A collaboration with Chinese Top Chef Steven Liu touches on both of those points. To celebrate the fact that Liu has created a business class menu for passengers depar ting from Shanghai and Beijing, Finnair teamed Liu up with Finnish counterpar t Sasu Laukkonen in a ‘five hour stopover challenge.’ The challenge sees Steven Liu arrive in Helsinki on his way from Shanghai to Paris, where Laukkonen collects him DEC 2016 ISSUE
TURKISH AIRLINES and drives him to a forest outside Helsinki. Laukkonen tells Liu that instead of going to a restaurant where someone else has made the choices for them, “on this stopover we will make our own choices”, thereby neatly reinforcing a key marketing message. The two then do everything from pick wild mushrooms to catch fish before preparing their meal at the side of a lake. Finally, with an hour to spare, Liu is driven back to the airpor t to catch his connecting flight. When appealing to international audiences it’s of course impor tant to take account of regional differences in social media consumption. As YouTube is largely unaccessible in China , Finnair has published the Stopover Challenge film on Chinese video hosting service YouKu, where it has so far notched up over 165k views . Fur ther videos on the microsite are dedicated to different ‘food stories’ where Liu and Laukkonen look at the different menu creations from the beef to the lobster.
A number of airlines such as Delta and (in par ticular) Air New Zealand have successfully used airline safety videos as a marketing tool, with their effor ts regularly notching up millions of views online. For other carriers that’s both a challenge and an oppor tunity. The oppor tunity is that there is now a proven appetite for these videos as a genre. The challenge however is to produce something that doesn’t look too “me too”, especially as the bar is being raised all the time. Turkish Airlines’ solution has been to enlist social media personality and digital illusionist Zach King as the star of its newest safety video. 25 year old Zach King is known for producing videos on YouTube and Instagram (where he has 16+ million fans ) where his shor t films are edited to look like magic tricks. In ‘Magic on board’ Zach King employs the same techniques for Turkish Airlines, ranging from making a
fellow passenger’s suitcase look like a small toy to blowing into a straw to illustrate the locations of the emergency exits. Having gained almost four million YouTube views in a month, the video has had an enthusiastic reception from bloggers and the media. For example, ’Boarding Area’ praises Turkish Airlines for making a truly engaging safety video that hasn’t had to be ar tificially extended beyond three minutes . The video concept was the idea of adver tising agency Crispin Por ter & Bogusky London, who went to the extent of even hiring a cognitive psychologist, Dr Gustav Kuhn, as a consultant . According to Dr Kuhn, “Magic is one of the oldest and most globally relevant ar t forms, studied by psychologists and neuroscientists alike for its ability to involve and indeed engross an audience. It’s exciting to see an airline tap into this reality, taking the modern inflight safety video in a whole new direction.”
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EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL DIGITAL TV, PRINT, OOH
