Air France - Marathon Scouts

Air France - Marathon Scouts

If you are a business traveller, what’s one way of seeing a city if you are going to be stuck in a meeting room for much of the day? Take an early morning run out of your hotel. It’s one reason why so many four and five star hotels provide running maps of their local area.

With business travellers being a key audience for any major airline, it’s also why Air France’s focus on marathons and running makes sense.

To promote its partnership with the Paris Marathon, Air France recruited five team members, its ‘Marathon Scouts’ to run the 26 miles before the event. Their exploits were then captured on a dedicated micro-site.

The site itself takes the form of a single page with a video at the top followed by ‘infinite scroll’ navigation, something that’s increasingly popular in destination and marketing websites (see the Los Angeles Olympics site for one high profile example of this)

When accessing the site, users choose to view it in either ‘effort’ or ‘recovery’ mode. If looking at it in effort mode, users are taken on a tour of the Marathon route complete with tips.

Meanwhile ‘Recovery’ is essentially a city tour of Paris, where the Marathon scouts talk about hints and tips en route, from how to ascend Montmartre without the climb, to how you can go swimming a stone’s throw away from Notre Dame.

If you want your brand to be associated with an activity or a trend, any sponsorship of course can’t just be a one-off, but it has to be supported with other activity.

Hence Air France has also worked with other running events around the world, for example the airline was a sponsor of the Sketchers Los Angeles marathon in March.

On a wider level, Flying Blue, the loyalty programme of both Air France and KLM has its own running programme, ‘Flying Blue Running’ . By signing up, members get information on the best running routes at different destinations and can even use miles to enter races.

Air France is of course not the first airline to run marketing campaigns around marathons, to mark its sponsorship of the Athens Marathon two years ago, Aegean Airlines surprised runners by flying in friends and relatives from abroad who cheered them on over the final stages of the route to give them the strength to finish the race.

Key Take-Away

Rather than just carry out a brand badging exercise, Air France has managed to really maximise its sponsorship.

The ‘Marathon Scouts’ are staff, which gives both the brand and sponsorship a human face. With its tour of Paris, the micro-site is relevant for runners and nonrunners alike and so reaches a potentially wide audience. And it’s consistent with other activity that both Air France and the Flying Blue programme have carried out in the past, you don’t question ‘why is Air France doing this?’