Virgin Australia-The Billion Miles Give-Away

VIRGIN AUSTRALIA - THE BILLION MILES GIVE-AWAY

“The intern did it” is the marketing equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”

Over the years, lowly interns have been blamed by a variety of brands and personalities ranging from Donald Trump to American Apparel.

Virgin Australia turned ‘blame the intern’ into a way of promoting it’s “billion miles give-away.”

This involved encouraging members of its Velocity loyalty-club programme to transfer across credit card or shopping points with the incentive of a 15% bonus. In itself, an announcement like this would not be very interesting.

It would merit an email mail-shot and a social media post or two and that would be the end of it. Hence Virgin Australia had to think of a different way to promote the campaign.

The mechanic was to send out a member email advertising a “billion mile giveaway” with a follow-up mail questioning whether the whole thing had been a big mistake.

Virgin Australia then filmed a series of short videos focusing on staff at the airline’s HQ in a panic over the fact that someone had changed “one million” to “one billion” in error.

The clips included a shame faced intern sitting in reception while staff yelled away behind closed doors and a member of staff asks “who is going to call Branson” as the airline would now be needing more planes for all the extra passengers wanting to fly.

Of course, the airline was only giving away a billion miles in theory, something that was made clear in the small print. As the One Mile at a Time blog points out, Virgin Australia could just have legitimately have called it the “trillion mile give-away.”

Reaction to the promotion has been mixed by industry blogs. Though One Mile at a Time commended Virgin Australia for showing a sense of humour, it still called the promotion “bizarrely misleading.”

However, German language blog “Boarding Area” congratulated Virgin Australia for filming videos that are both genuinely funny while also shining a light on things that genuinely happen in offices, in particular company “blame-storms” where middle managers panic on where mistakes can be pinned.

KEY TAKE-AWAY

The promotion may have been, on the surface of it, misleading, but it also turned out to be a great way to get attention for something that would otherwise have gone largely un-noticed.

Our guess is that most recipients of the ‘Billion Miles Give-away” would have seen the funny side especially as the majority will have been white collar workers such as those portrayed in the video. Those videos had very much a feel of “The Office” about them, and the intended target audience would both have recognised the different scenarios and characters and laughed along with them.