Turlish Airlines - Magic On Board

Turlish Airlines - Magic On Board

A number of airlines such as Delta and (in particular) Air New Zealand have successfully used airline safety videos as a marketing tool, with their efforts regularly notching up millions of views online.

For other carriers that’s both a challenge and an opportunity. The opportunity 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 short 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 artificially extended beyond three minutes .

The video concept was the idea of advertising agency Crispin Porter & 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 art 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.