3 minute read
Transavia - Empty Billboards
During holiday periods in France, a lot of advertising billboards remain unsold andempty. In that case, they appear with just a single green sheet (and no text) overthem.
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According to agency Havas Paris, 1000+ billboards typically look like this, meaning they are essentially on vacation, like much of the public.
Green also happens to be the colour of LCC Transavia (part of the Air France / KLM group). As a result, in late April, the agency used this insight to turn the empty green ads into free ads for the airline.
All this empty ad real estate was co-opted as follows:
First of all, Transavia announced on social media that these green billboards were in fact part of the airline’s new ad campaign, using the tagline
So far so good, the association between the empty ads, the colour green and Transavia was established among the airline’s social media following.
After that, the next step was to think about how the logo could appear on these empty spaces, without actually spending any money on a media buy.
Also, how could the campaign be shared far and wide?
The answer was to create a kind of social media challenge around the green billboards. Social media fans were asked to take pictures of them, to tag Transavia in the post, and then to geo-tag it on Instagram.
Each billboard and location also corresponded to a different Transavia destination.
Being the first to photograph and tag the billboard meant you won flights to that city.
While all this was going on, Transavia told fans how many flights could still be won, turning the whole campaign into a game, where people would actively seek out and tag the empty ad spaces, for the chance of winning a prize.
Sometimes the best campaigns come from quite simple ideas, and linked to that, sometimes great creative solutions are right in front of us, but we don’t see them.
This was a fantastic campaign because this was one of those occasions where the idea was actually quite simple: Unsold billboards in France are green, and green is also the colour of Transavia.
It’s not something that needs to be explained, consumers will instantly get it.
More than that, it involved social media fans in disseminating and amplifying the campaign. And of course, it cost next to nothing (other than the campaign production costs).
Finally, this campaign will keep on working for Transavia.
The airline of course isn’t the only brand to have green as its primary colour.
But the fact that Transavia got there first and ‘claimed’ all this unsold advertising real estate as its own, meant that these empty billboards will continue to be associated with it, and not with any other brand.
Transavia has been known for its innovative and sometimes off the wall over the past few years.
In 2017, it worked with Uber on a campaign called ‘Uber Escapes’ in Paris, Lyon and Nantes.
Opening the Uber app, resulted in users seeing an “Uber Escape” button, where they could instantly buy a getaway to different destinations taking off from the nearest airport (with the ticket being added onto the Uber Fare).
Meanwhile in 2015, Transavia won numerous marketing awards for its “SnackHolidays” campaign.
This involved Transavia working with supermarket giant Carrefourand snack vending machine company Selecta to produce Transaviabranded snacks, which also had the name of a destination on it.
Buying the snack, and having it scanned at checkout, meant being able to buy a ticket to Lisbon, Barcelona or Dublin for €35-€40.
As an aside the Transavia SnackHoliday campaign is not dissimilar to a ten year old travel campaign run by (now closed) Australian ad agency Happy Soldiers on behalf of online travel company Zuji.
Happy Soldiers and Zuji produced and sold cheap tins of baked beans for 10 cents, the idea being that by buying this super cheap food, you could save money for a holiday. That particular campaign ended up winning a Golden Lion in Cannes.
