Brussels Airlines-15th Birthday Commercial

BRUSSELS AIRLINES - 15TH BIRTHDAY COMMERCIAL

While many airlines go out of their way to celebrate landmark anniversaries with splashy ad campaigns, contests and even discounts on airfares, Brussels Airlines took their 15th anniversary celebration to heartwarming new heights with their recent spot entitled: “Happy Birthday.”

An offshoot of their long-running “Going the Extra Smile for You” campaign, the carrier took the unusual approach of creating a sequel of sorts to one of their most popular spots from fifteen years ago, the much buzzed-about “It’s a Boy” clip – where a team of real life Brussels Airlines crew members go out of their way to alert a passenger as his plane departs that his wife has given birth to a baby boy by “writing” the words “It’s a boy” on the tarmac with their bodies.

Now, fifteen years later, the carrier has recruited almost all of the original actors from the earlier spot for a sequel where the crew wishes the now-fifteen-year-old boy happy birthday from the tarmac as he and his father depart on a Brussels Airlines flight.

The spot has made a nod to the changing face of cockpits this time around with the addition of a female pilot. And though some might say it’s hard, if not impossible, to capture lightening in a bottle twice, the carrier has done exactly that with the new spot which has already been viewed more than 2 Million times on the carrier’s Facebook page and almost 197K times on YouTube since it debuted just over a month ago.

Already the subject of glowing writeups on such popular travel blogs as Prior2Boarding.com, PayloadAsia.com, and ASunnySquare.com, the spot looks to be another marketing slam dunk for Brussels Airlines which has spent the past fifteen years making a name for itself on the international front while staying true to their Belgian heritage by flying liveries emblazoned with images of such celebrated Belgian icons as surrealist painter René Magritte, comic book hero Tin Tin and the Belgian football team, the Belgian Red Devils.

KEY TAKE-AWAY

If something works once, it might well work again. Latching onto the current pop culture zeitgeist where everything old is new again and TV show reboots of classic shows like The Gilmore Girls, Full House and Twin Peaks are all the rage, Brussels Airlines has struck marketing gold by returning to what is arguably their best spot ever.