Malaysia Airlines-Take me to Anfield

MALAYSIA AIRLINES - TAKE ME TO ANFIELD

Professional football (soccer) continues to be a big focus for the airline industry. Last month we talked about Etihad’s on-going sponsorship of Manchester City resulting in the City2City campaign celebrating grass-roots football in different Etihad destinations.

Meanwhile airlines such as Emirates and Qatar Airways have in the past leveraged different club sponsorships to produce in-flight safety videos.

The latest airline / football campaign comes from Malaysia Airlines, which last year became the global airline of Liverpool FC.

In the ‘Take me to Anfield’ campaign fans were given the chance to travel to Anfield (Liverpool’s home ground) to play a match by being a member of one of two teams, each captained by a former Liverpool player - Robbie Fowler and Gary McAllister.

To enter, fans had to submit a short video of themselves showing off their football skills and submit the film on Malaysia Airlines’ social media channels. Over April, the competition was promoted on social networks, as well as through tieups with radio stations in Malaysia. As a result of this, Malaysia Airlines received 500 video submissions.

When it comes to social media competitions, getting people to do more than simply fill in their name can be tough, so for a promotion that relied on people going through a considerable amount of effort, that’s an impressive number.

Individual entries were showcased on Facebook as a way of keeping interest going, with each video regularly generating upwards of 10,000 views.

Every entry of course also gave Malaysia Airlines a human interest story that they could leverage by way of content.

The final team was drawn from Indonesia, the UK, South Korea, Singapore, China, Japan and of course Malaysia itself.

The match then took place on May 14th, with “Team Fowler” beating “Team McAllister” 4-2.

Strangely, the stadium appears eerily deserted during the match except for a few relatives of the two UK-based players.

Unless it was for operational reasons, this looks like a missed trick, e.g. why not invite UK fans and give them discount vouchers to use on Malaysian Airlines flights and do a destination marketing at the same time.

Similarly the match doesn’t appear to have been streamed on Facebook Live, instead there is a two minute highlight video.

KEY TAKE-AWAY

A theme that we’ve touched on in these reports has been the need to maximise any sponsorship deal so it’s just not a brand badging exercise.

How can you generate excitement beyond the initial announcement? How can you create on-going content? How can you best leverage your social media channels, as well as that of the team benefitting from the sponsorship? How can you get your own fans involved?

In the ‘Take me to Anfield’ campaign, Malaysia Airlines tapped into the huge fan base that English Premier League clubs like Liverpool FC have in the Far East, and successfully channeled that enthusiasm by getting fans to create content on the airline’s behalf.

A YouTube search shows that people also uploaded the videos onto their own channels, meaning that they started taking ownership of the campaign.

The one possible missed opportunity was that the promotion could have been used to engage local UK fans as a way of highlighting the airline’s route network from Heathrow to Malaysia and beyond.