The WOW Air Travel Guide

FEATURED CAMPAIGN WOW TRAVEL GUIDE - WOW AIR

In 2009, a travel campaign “stormed” the annual Cannes Lion advertising awards. So much so that it is still being talked about today as an example of best practice travel marketing. The campaign was ‘The Best Job in the World’ by Tourism Queensland, where a worldwide search was conducted to find a paid “caretaker” to live on a tropical island. Tourism Queensland claimed that this campaign resulted in more than $80m of equivalent media advertising space.

Nine years on, and another travel brand is trying something not dissimilar, and it’s already getting a lot of media pick-up. WOW Air has launched the “WOW Travel Guide.” The idea behind it simple. Two people will have a “paid Summer job” this Summer in Iceland. However they won’t be there all the time, instead they will visit each of WOW Air’s 38 destinations. Specifically, the successful applicants will move to Iceland from 1 June until 15 August, where they will receive a monthly salary and live in an apartment in downtown Reykjavik.

They will use the place as a base to travel to destinations served by WOW Air across Europe and North America and will also explore Iceland. They’ll get a monthly salary, with the stipulation that they have to create content about the different destinations.

The result will then be the ‘WOW Travel Guide”, a compilation of content about all the places WOW Air flies to. 4800 VIDEO APPLICATIONS RECEIVED To apply, you have to upload a short travel guide of your hometown onto YouTube by May 14th.

At time of writing, YouTube search revealed a whopping 4800 video “applications” for the WOW Air job. And many of these video applications aren’t from run of the mill members of the public, it looks as if bloggers and so called social media influencers are trying to get in on the act.

The result is that some of these application videos have a fair amount of views

For example, a guide to the nightlife in Playa del Carmen has received over 100,000 views, and 4000+ likes. Unfortunately WOW Air doesn’t fly there, and our hunch is that WOW Air will probably choose someone from an existing destination.

Likewise, we suspect that the bloggers who uploaded the very professional and fun guide to Taipei, Taipei zoo and Night Market will be out of luck. However there are plenty of videos for destinations that WOW Air does fly to. For example, this one by Monica Ortega on Chicago, has already notched up almost 20k views.

A lot of bloggers (as well as a lot of ordinary members of the public) clearly really, really want this job, and our suspicion is that on a few of the videos we saw, the views and likes were artificially “juiced up” (see our piece on the ecosystem of fakes in our launch magazine for Visible).

On most though, the engagement appears to be real and the content creator reputable. That means that WOW Air is already reaching hundreds of thousands of travel fans online for free - and the competition is still in its first phase. WOW Air has a track-record of producing fun and creative campaigns aimed at millennials, and this one very much fits into that mix.

For example, WOW Air has produced one of the best examples of Snapchat Marketing through it’s Snaptraveler campaign in 2016, where (in an idea not dissimilar to the current Travel Guide competition) Snapchat influencers went to WOW Air destinations.

Meanwhile to launch its new California (LA, SF) routes to Iceland and beyond, WOW Air worked with professional surfer Anastasia Ashley (who has two million Facebook fans) in coming up with a 24 hour surf challenge, where she had to surf both a beach in LA and one in Iceland in a day.

KEY TAKE-AWAY

This is a great campaign, where the results so far speak for themselves. Indeed, the only reason why we haven’t put it on this month’s cover is that it still has several months to run - and as a result, we’ll probably be revisiting it over the Summer.

However, it’s well thought out to target WOW Air’s core millennial audience, with CNBC calling it a campaign where WOW Air “will will pay you $4,000 a month to travel the world for free with your BFF.”

Engagement so far via the video entries has been excellent, and there’s been a lot of media pick-up about the campaign. No doubt that will increase as the campaign progresses.