S7 Airlines, Visit Earth

At the end of last year we started seeing short YouTube videos from Russian airline S7, that seemed to take the form of some kind of bizarre reality TV show.

We asked one of our Russian speaking colleagues what it was all about, and she told us that the airline had created a travel guide to earth for aliens.

This travel guide - Visit Earth - has now been translated into English for audiences outside Russia. Forming a six episode online video series that has also been beamed into space, it’s our cover story for the month.

S7 - A track record of doing things differently

This isn’t the first time we’ve featured S7.

The airline has been on our covers on a number of occasions, for example with the “best planet” campaign where Cosmonaut Andrei Borisenko told us that the most amazing experiences can be found right here on Earth, and with “I am you”, which encouraged people to leave behind the fake experiences of the digital world and see the real world for themselves.

Other S7 campaigns worth noting are the 2015 Imagination Machine, which was both an experiential stunt where participants could “fly” a virtual planeto a destination using their minds (via an EEG headset), as well as a beautifully shot ad where kids talked about magical places they’d love to go, after which S7 showed that these destinations exist right here on earth.

Then of course, there was the collaboration with OK Go, where the music video for “Upside down and Inside Out” was filmed in zero gravity on an S7 aircraft. That particular activity saw the airline win a Gold Lion at the annual Cannes Advertising Awards.

Finally, as a Russian airline, S7 of course created marketing activity around the 2018 World Cup. In particular, a rather manic video shows a stunt where a set of goal posts were painted on a luggage carousel at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport.

If your bag “hit” the goal you won a prize (flights).

The point is, with less than 100 aircraft (including no wide body jets), S7 is by no means a ‘big’ airline, but in marketing terms it consistently comes out with campaigns and ideas that are stand-out unique. Though it incorporates ideas from previous S7 campaigns, the alien travel guide, “Visit Earth” is no different.

Visit Earth - Six episodes for “aliens”

As with previous S7 campaigns such as the Best Planet and the Imagination Engine, ‘Visit Earth’ was created by W&K Amsterdam.

W&K Amsterdam brought on Canadian director, Mackenzie Sheppard, winner of the Young Director’s Award Prize, at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, for the six episodes of Visit Earth.

Meanwhile the series was narrated in Russian by Dmitry Syenduk, known to Russian TV viewers as the voice of the cartoon series “Rick & Monty.”

These six episodes cover nature, food, love, parties, sport and art.

They are intended to give alien viewers a taste of the best things our planet has to offer, with the idea being that after watching the different episodes, our extraterrestrial friends will set off to see Earth for themselves.

Working with Mackenzie Sheppard, W&K travelled to Spain, Thailand, Italy, Japan and of course Russia (Sochi and St. Petersburg), to shoot the six episodes.

As part of this they looked to unearth quirky stories like Italian cheese bowlers and Icelandic nudists to capture the imagination of aliens. This real-life travel footage was then merged with “commercial breaks” explaining basic Earth concepts such as gravity, air and food made of dough.

According to S7, the thinking behind the campaign harks back to much of the thinking behind the Best Planet and I am You - namely that there are so many amazing things to discover, yet we’ve switched off and often forget they are here waiting to be seen, heard, felt and tasted.

The campaign is underpinned by a micro-site or ‘online hub.’ Though the international, English language campaign has just launched, W&K Amsterdam says that the Russian site has seen over 35 million visits over the past few months. .

There, visitors could watch all six episodes, as well as create their ‘travel guides’ for aliens, in exchange for a chance to win flights.

Finally, to make sure aliens actually see it and come and visit, the show has been beamed into space with a RT 7.5 radio telescope and a specially developed transmitter.

Apparently, the signal is expected to reachthe exoplanet Gliese 581c in 20 years - setyour watches to 2039.

A campaign that’s uniquely S7

This is a fantastic campaign, and the airline and agency deserve to once again win awards for it. First of all it’s unique, and it took guts to create something like this. Can you imagine many other airlines rolling this out, and it getting past the board in this exact form?

In a space where so many campaigns are interchangeable (swap the airline logo around and you don’t notice a difference), this is distinctively S7. The messaging is also consistent with previous campaigns such as TheBest Planet.

Branding is subtle to the point of being almost non existent - the content is allowed to work.

The only hint of a commercial message is a list of destinations at the end of every video with the heading “this is where aliens can enjoy food”, “this is where aliens can enjoy sport”, and so on.

The wealth of content and funny little clips means there are so many things to see, comment on and share. Indeed in a director’s notes explanation, Mackenzie Sheppard says that the “things in dough” clip went viral in its own right in Russia.

Then there is an element of audience participation (letting Russian viewers submit their own travel guides), and finally beaming the episodes into space makes for a final nice creative twist.

Well done S7 Airlines on once again being featured on our cover.

(Campaign images, courtesy of W&K Amsterdam)