Cathay Pacific - The Sounds Of Travelling Well

Cathay Pacific - The Sounds Of Travelling Well

Travel is a sensory experience, with what you see forming a key part of it. This in part explains the emphasis most airlines now place on the photo-sharing network Instagram. But so do other senses, such as sound.

What sound do you associate with a destination, or with the journey of getting there? That thought forms the basis of Cathay Pacific’s latest campaign, “The Sounds of Travelling Well.”

Developed by advertising agency McCann Worldwide, the “Sounds of Travelling Well” is a track put together from thousands of individual sounds, ranging from a seat-belt fastening, to busy roads in Asian cities. Why a song? According to the airline, “through sound, memories and feelings can be just as strongly invoked (as in sight). This is why we crafted a song unlike any other. A song made from the many sounds we experience on a journey.”

The campaign website then encourages passengers to share (in words, not audio) the sounds they most associate with travel, potentially giving Cathay Pacific a wider bank of content they can draw on to extend the campaign. Entering gives passengers the chance to win flight tickets.

The whole campaign is fronted by Isabella Wong, who is also known as Bella Kuan, a Hong Kong based travel writer and blogger with a significant social media following. Bella appears in a number of videos featuring the soundtrack.

Other airlines have experimented with music before, chiefly through working with Spotify in releasing playlists.

Several years ago Air France also released an innovative app called ‘music in the sky’. Pointing your phone at the clouds while having the app open would ‘locate’ different Air France aircraft flying to various destinations, each with its own song to download.

While a creative idea, this writer found the hassle factor of actually using it in waving his phone in the air too much.

Arguably however what Cathay Pacific has done is look at sound in a more generic way, rather than just at music.

This initial track is of course very Asian focused, so we imagine that the brand team has already been thinking of how to extend the campaign into capturing sounds associated with other parts of the world.

Key Take-Away

Most airline marketing campaigns now use striking imagery as a matter of course, so Cathay Pacific has looked at a different and sometimes overlooked sense, sound.

However, one thing that stuck us was how much more effective the Cathay Pacific campaign was when watching the Bella Kuan videos, which goes to show that in any ‘sensory’ campaign like this, things work best if the senses work together.