Beat This Precision by airBaltic

Beat This Precision by airBaltic

The soccer World Cup is not the only major sporting event going on, Professional Tennis has two major tournaments in the late Spring and Summer - RolandGarros (the French Open) in Paris and Wimbledon in London.

The defending champion of RolandGarros (the French Open) is actually Latvian - Alona Ostapenko. As a result, Riga-based Air Baltic created a video on which of them, the airline or the tennis champion, is the “most precise.”

Air Baltic’s emphasis on precision comes after the airline was ranked No 1 globally in punctuality in 2017 by OAG analysts.

How did Air Baltic measure ‘precision?’ By pitting Ostapenko against one of Air Baltic’s Bombardier CS300 aircraft.

The airline built a temporary tennis court at Riga Airport, with Air Baltic cabin crew acting as ball boys and girls. On one end of the court was Ostapenko, while several hundred metres away from the other side of the court was the aircraft - with its engines running.

A staff member threw the ball towards the back of the aircraft engine, the force of which then pelted it back towards the tennis star, who had to hit it back.

The challenge was to do this 100x. However as the pilot of the aircraft was progressively increasing the thrust of the engines, at serve number 90, the ball actually made a hole in Ostapenko’s tennis racket. As a result, Air Baltic decided the “match” was a draw.

Air Baltic has built a micro-site that shows how the whole stunt worked, along with a video that includes tennis match style commentary. Registering on the site also gave you the chance to win two free tickets to fly to Paris for the French Open.

This isn’t the first time that Alona Ostapenko has worked with Air Baltic. In December, the star visited the Air Baltic Training Center, where she flew in a flight simulator. Ostapenko had also been invited to sit in the cockpit on her return flight from the 2017 Wimbledon tournament in London.

On Facebook, the video of Alona Ostapenko playing the CS300 has so far been watched 170k, while it has netted 48k views on YouTube.

Key Take-Away

In the article on Icelandair, we talked about the importance of any sports sponsorship leveraging the individual stories of the stars and bringing out their personalities.

One way of doing that is through challenges - e,g, as we showed earlier, Manchester United players were put through a four minute cake decorating challenge by Aeroflot.

When you are sponsoring an individual star, as is the case here, rather than a whole team, that is of course much more straightforward.

Nevertheless, the challenge that Air Baltic came up with was really unique and creative. It was fun, watchable, and kudos to Air Baltic for the way they made their aircraft part and parcel of the stunt and at the same time managed to promote their recent award for punctuality.