Star Alliance-Connecting Cultures

STAR ALLIANCE - CONNECTING CULTURES

The world’s biggest airline alliance grouping, Star Alliance, marks its 20th birthday in 2017, and as you would expect a whole series of marketing initiatives are being rolled out to support this milestone.

The campaign, which includes an advertising campaign, a ‘millionaire mileage’ competition and a online video series is grouped under the heading “Connecting Cultures.”

The idea behind the strap-line is of course clear, the campaign is a celebration of how airline members have brought people together over the past twenty years.

Entering the million miles competition involves going to a micro-site, uploading a selfie and a photo of your favorite cultural experience. The two photos are then blended together and added to a map, which at time of writing already has several hundred entries. The winner will then be chosen on September 28th.

The whole campaign is underpinned by a web video series featuring National Geographic’s Robert Reid where he takes part in a challenge set by the five founding Star Alliance members (Lufthansa, United, SAS, THAI and Air Canada).

So far two videos have been released. The first saw Robert Reid take part in a Thai boxing match in Bangkok, while the second had him conquer his fear of heights through an early morning walk over the rooftops of Stockholm.

Future videos will include Robert Reid travelling to the highest village in Europe (in Georgia) with Lufthansa to watch a horse race, surviving in sub-zero temperatures with Inuit people in Canada (in the Air Canada challenge), and a trip to the annual “Gathering of Nations” Native American festival with United.

Each Robert Reid video is 7-8 minutes long and is well put together without being too sales focused - airline mentions and branding are subtle.

The length is interesting as there’s an on-going marketing debate about the optimal length of online videos. One viewpoint points to short attention spans where where 20% of viewers leave in the first ten seconds.

However at the same time, Google has carried out experiments that show that people will stick around if the story is good enough . Star Alliance seems to have embraced this approach, and certainly the videos don’t seem ‘long’ thanks to Robert Reid’s easy-going nature and effective narration.

In addition to the competition and videos, an ad campaign is running in support of the anniversary campaign.

These feature a series of 30 second ads where imagery of passengers is interspersed with Star Alliance pictures, while each film plays up a different Star Alliance benefit ranging from “fast connections for you and your bag” to “making your connection smoother.”

The Star Alliance campaign was developed by London creative agency ‘Atomic’

KEY TAKE-AWAY

Connecting Cultures features a big prize (the chance to be a mileage millionaire) with an easy mechanic as it doesn’t take much effort to upload two pictures onto a website.

As a result, by the time the winner is drawn in September, Star Alliance should have thousands of entries, each being a different piece of content and a story that can in turn help promote the overall message of ‘connecting cultures.’

Meanwhile putting together longer videos to support a campaign is always a risk, but due to the format and the narrator, Star Alliance has made it work.