The EasyJet Flying Car by EasyJet

The EasyJet Flying Car by EasyJet

Airline and car rental partnerships are not intrinsically newsworthy or interesting. After all, a preferred car rental supplier is something that just about every airline has.

EasyJet however, turned the 15th anniversary of its partnership with Europcar into something noteworthy by coming up with a novel idea. The airline and car rental company pretended to offer the world’s first “flying cars.”

The mechanic of this was a series of short ‘mockumentary’ style films, uploaded onto easyJet’s social media channels.

“Fly-Drive” is a collection of 1-2 minute clips where staff members are followed around in their imaginary jobs in a near future involving flying cars.

For example, in one, “landing bay manager” Ian sits on top of a bell tower in Spain with his binoculars pointed at the sky. He then shoos tourists away from his hand painted parking spot in a town square, while another staff member called Rashid shows off a so-called “Readiness Scale” (a home-made piece of canvas with stickers on them).

In another film, a customer services rep called Rebecca gets a mechanic to explain how the Flying Car works (“it’s basically just magnets.”).

Finally, a third clip sees pilot Sara train a hapless member of the public in how to fly the flying car, during which he presses random buttons and asks if he can do the ‘loop de loop.’

According to Kim McDonnell, head of proposition at easyJet:

We are excited by future innovations that will make travel easier for our passengers. We therefore wanted to offer our customers an entertaining insight into what the future could hold. The mockumentaries allow us to create fun content for customers and highlight our long standing and successful partnership with Europcar, which millions of EasyJet customers use each year.

White Noise

EasyJet also deserves a mention for two further marketing campaigns.

“Lucky Trip” has been added to the easyJet mobile app, where customers apply filters allowing them to select their perfect holiday. Lucky Trip was one of two startups selected by the airline last year as part of its Travel Tech accelerator programme. The other was ‘FLIO”, which is an airport discovery and navigation app.

Meanwhile, last year easyJet launched a ‘white noise’ video, for charity. Recorded at 39,000ft en-route from Gatwick to Nice, the track features engine sounds and is designed to help children go to sleep.

With the soundtrack on sale on both Google Play and the iTunes store, proceeds are going to The Children’s Sleep Charity, to help further support children and families with sleep issues.

In addition to the soundtrack, easyJet released a special ten hour video for YouTube followers, which has just passed the 200,00 view mark (clearly, this doesn’t mean 200,000 people watched it for ten hours).

Key Take-Away

Marketing magazine ‘The Drum’ calls the films about the Flying Car “laugh inducing” and we’d agree.

You don’t often see a truly original idea (many marketing campaigns build on an idea that’s been done before), but this is one. Indeed, it is the kind of thing where you think “why didn’t I think of that myself?”

Well done to easyJet for coming up with something creative and different and turning something that might otherwise have merited a ‘news in brief’ article in a trade magazine into something that has netted over a million views on Facebook alone.