Qantas - Dr Seuss Credit Card

Qantas - Dr Seuss Credit Card

“Oh, the Places you’ll go!” is one of the best known book’s by children’s author Dr Seuss.

A video ad, which is being shown online, asks frequent flyers to imagine, “the sights you’ll soar” telling them “your mountain is waiting, so get on your way”.

Key passages of the book have additionally been tailored to fit Qantas and the product. For example, reworked quotes include “There are points to be scored”, “you’ll be seeing great sights” and “You’ll join the high flyers”, all read in a Dr Seuss narrative style.

In addition to an online video ad, the campaign is also appearing in airports over July.

According to Qantas Chief Marketing Officer Stephanie Tully, credit cards don’t have much of an emotional pull, and so rather than focus on the card, this campaign focuses on what the card can do for you when you use it:

“Given credit card spend by nature is transactional, this campaign has given us a platform to…show people all the places they can go with their bonus Qantas Points upon sign-up, and the points they build when they use their card every day.”

Almost every major airline of course now has an affinity credit card. However there is no need for these cards to be promoted in a functional way.

Indeed, airlines looking to market their card would do well to draw inspiration from creative and successful fintech campaigns outside the aviation industry.

For example, Visa and fashion house Henry Holland teamed up to create a “Cashless on the Catwalk” campaign at London Fashion Week, where ten VIP influencers were able to make real-time purchases using near-field communication (NFC) payment rings and smart brooches.

An airline could easily build on the core of this idea, and run a shopping challenge using a group of influencers in different destinations.

Another example of an airline that succeeded into turning something that people might not find very interesting into a creative marketing campaign is Virgin Australia, which we featured last month.

In it, Virgin Australia ‘pretended’ it had made a mistake in calling a million miles.

give-away for people who transferred credit card loyalty points, a ‘billion miles give-away.’

It then made a series of ‘The Office’ style videos, which included for example a shame-faced intern sitting in the corridor while managers were yelling away about the “mistake” behind closed doors.

Key Take-Away

Dr Seuss has universal appeal, and the link between ‘Oh the places you can go!’ and an airline are obvious. This then provided Qantas with an accessible hook around which to position the benefits of its new card - basically the more you spend, the further you can travel.

As we mentioned, airlines launching new cards would do well to look more widely at other fin tech campaigns for inspiration, for example this list from Lets Talk Payments has some good examples.