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The best airline marketing campaigns of 2018
A year in review our cover campaigns
Over the past year, we have featured almost 300 airline and aviation marketing campaigns in the magazine, with twelve monthly cover campaigns.
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January KLM ‘Pack Assistant’
The latest in a series of tech innovations by KLM, the Pack Assistant was our first cover story of the year.
Running via KLM’s BB Bot, and the Google Home service, the bot asks you where you are travelling to, when you plan to go and how long you plan to stay.
From there, BB provides a list of recommended supplies you will likely need to make your stay a successful one.
February Lufthansa ‘Explore the New’
Who has the oldest airline logo in the World? The answer is Lufthansa, where the German architect and designer Otto Firle designed the iconic ‘flying crane in a circle’ logo in 1918 for Deutsche Luft- Reederei (DLR), Lufthansa’s predecessor.
On 7 February (but leaked well beforehand), Lufthansa showed off the new livery in Frankfurt, to staff, journalists, bloggers and select social media influencers. The flying crane remains, but rather than a blue and yellow design, Lufthansa has gone (almost) all blue.
Though the logo change was controversial, the way Lufthansa told the story of the brand refresh was excellent, and a model for other brands to follow.
March American Airlines ‘The Bonnie Awards’
American Airlines worked with the Film Independent Spirit Awards, to create the ‘Bonnie Awards’, which recognises independent female film-makers.
The name was inspired by Bonnie Tiburzi Caputo, who became the first female pilot to fly for a major U.S. airline when she joined American, and the prize is substantial - it involves a $50,000 grant from American to the winner.
This year the winner was Chloe Zhao, who produced, directed and wrote the Western drama “The Rider.”
April ANA, ‘Avatar XPrize’
Part of the airline’s ongoing ‘avatar’ initiative, the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE allows teams around the world to enter and “accelerate the development of a multipurpose avatar system that will enable us to...interact with physical environments and other people through an integrated robotic device.”
The driving force behind the initiative are ANA employees Akira Fukabori, Market Communication Intrapreneur, and Kevin Kajitani, Digital Design Lab Intrapreneur. In 2015 they won an XPRIZE themselves, where they reimagined transportation.
This took them on a journey where they eventually persuaded their bosses at ANA to put $10 million behind the development of avatar technology via the XPRIZE partnership.
May Jet2, ‘The Ultimate School Trip’
According to UK leisure airline Jet2, “School trips help to create some of our best school memories. Inspirational locations, learning outside the classroom and the joy of travelling with your best mates all make school trips magical.”
This insight led the airline to launch it’s “Ultimate School Trip” campaign, last November, with the actual trip taking place at the end of April 2018.
A hugely impressive 1600 school classes across the UK took part in the competition, where the prize was a trip to Sol Katmandu Park & Resort in Majorca, with the campaign fronted by two British kids’ TV personalities (‘Dick and Dom’).
June World Cup edition, Icelandair ‘Team Iceland Stopover’
We dedicated a lot of the June edition to World Cup campaigns, but our cover story was the Icelandair ‘Team Iceland Stopover’ campaign, where Icelandic national team players developed different stopover experiences.
Passengers could apply for one of these experiences on a micro-site, and while they were in theory football themed, they involved much more than just hitting a ball around a pitch.
Experiences included the chance to attend a local Reykjavík match, where you would learn to ‘support like an Icelander’, while the “Goal in One” experience actually involved hitting nine holes of golf in 90 minutes. Finally, the airline gave away ten chances to join the Icelandic team supporters’ club “Tólfan (The twelfth man).”
July Delta ‘Summer Wall’
Last year we profiled the Delta Dating Wall. This was a campaign launched in cooperation with dating social network Tinder, where people could take their photos in front of Delta destinations such as London, Paris, Los Angeles or Moscow.
This was followed up over the Summer of 2018 by an Instagram worthy “selfie wall”, which was once again situated in the Williamsburg, Brooklyn area of New York.
In a campaign developed by ad agency W&K, the wall featured the “pilot alphabet” - e.g “Mike”, “India”, “Golf”, “Hotel”, “Tango” etc. - in a mural created by Amsterdam-based Australian artist Karan Singh.
August HiFly ‘Save the coral reefs’
In August we looked at the long-standing practice of airlines to produce special liveries for their aircraft for marketing purposes.
We featured a number of different airlines, but for our cover we chose HiFly, which painted its A380 in a ‘save the coral reefs’ livery in association with charity the Mirpuri Foundation, whose President, Paulo Mirpuri, is also the President of HiFly.
September Lufthansa Worldwide Sneaker Day
Earlier in the year as part of its rebrand, Lufthansa released a number of limited edition items that staff could buy. One was a pair of sneakers, produced in association with Adidas.
In September, the airline then held a Worldwide Sneaker Day, where employees could wear the special edition sneakers (or any other sneaker, preferably white).
October British Airways and Heathrow ‘Freddie for a day’
To mark the new “Bohemian Rhapsody” film, and the fact that Queen frontman Freddie Mercury used to be a baggage handler at Heathrow, British Airways and Heathrow Airport arranged for a group of 2018 baggage handlers to perform ‘I want to break free.’
Other Queen related activity took place at Heathrow included the arrivals boards being transformed so that cities and flights turned into Queen songs (e.g. BA 1977 was listed as coming from “We Will Rock You”)
November SAS ‘The Arrivals’
The latest in a series of campaigns by SAS under the theme ‘We are travelers’, The Arrivals looked to capture and own the emotions and experience of what happens when you have friends and loved ones waiting for you in arrivals.
The campaign featured a photographer and filmmaker being in CPH for a full week, looking to capture spontaneous moments. ■
WestJet Christmas miracle
In 2013, WestJet launched its first “Christmas Miracle” - that year 250 passengers on two Calgary bound flights were surprised with presents on the baggage conveyor belt on arrival, that they had previously requested from ‘Santa’ before take-off. That 2013 video has subsequently been viewed almost 50 million times.
Since then WestJet has arguably created the stand-out airline Christmas campaign of the year, owning Christmas in the same way as Air New Zealand ‘owns’ safety videos.
Subsequent Christmas miracles have included a surprise Christmas celebration for the residents of Fort McMurray, Alberta, who had been affected by the devastating 2016 forest fires, as well as a 2014 Christmas party for the residents of Nuevo Renacar in the Dominican Republic, complete with mounds of fake snow.
This year, WestJet’s Christmas miracle is going global and celebrating Christmas traditions from around the world in places as far afield as Australia, Japan, Haiti and the UK.
A Christmas Advent Calendar has a daily video under the heading “Uniting Through Traditions”, with a new one being released every day. Each shows the airline’s “Blue Santa” character going to a different place around the world to showcase that country or city’s Christmas tradition.
For example, on December 4th, Blue Santa was shown going to Sydney and having a Christmas BBQ with some friends on Bondi Beach, before going surfing.
During his journey, Blue Santa has also been surprising people with reunion experiences. For example, on December 2nd, he’s shown in London. A group of people are told they are starring in an ad, before being reunited with loved ones.
This includes two Canadian parents reunited with their daughter in front of Hamleys toy store on Regent Street, a couple reunited with their best friends on the top of a London double
decker bus, and a woman reunited with her boyfriend who she originally met in Las Vegas - with their story having an extra twist as they met on the night of the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting.
At the same time, the airline is encouraging people to create their own reunions through WestJet’s location finder - an interactive global map.
Participants can enter their location and the location of a loved one and WestJet will suggest a great place for them to reunite.
By participating in the contest each participant is then entered to win roundtrip economy airfare for two anywhere WestJet flies.
Though we were only able to view a few of the videos at time of writing, producing several dozen like this was obviously a huge endeavour for the airline. In addition to which there was a quick turn-around for each.
For example, the London video released on December 2nd, already shows a London that has Christmas decorations up. In fact, WestJet said that they filmed the London reunions on 12-13
November. WestJet told Airline Marketing Monthly that the global nature of this year’s Christmas miracle is deliberate - as is the inclusion of cities such as Tokyo or Sydney, which the airline doesn’t fly to (and has no plans to at the moment):
The 16 countries WestJet chose for the campaign, “also left us room for other content pieces and surprise and delights over the month of December. We also selected those destinations because they are all accessible via our WestJet Rewards Member Exclusive Fares.”
Last month we wrote about WestJet’s new brand positioning “Love where you’re going”, that seeks to build the airline’s reputation as more of a global brand. This coincides with the planned introduction of its first three international Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner routes from Calgary. ■
