Air Asia - Get off in Thailand

An example of marketing gone wrong is Air Asia’s recent Australian ad campaign.

In March, Air Asia took out advertising on buses in Brisbane, encouraging travellers to “get off in Thailand.”

Unfortunately, in some English speaking countries (including the UK and Australia), ‘get off’ doesn’t only mean disembarking from a form of transport, it’s also a sexual euphemism.

Hence the LCC quickly found itself under fire from Australian social media users, complaining that the airline had run a “dog whistle ad” promoting “sex tourism.”

The end result was that Air Asia had to pull the ads, but not before the campaign was covered for all the wrong reasons in Australian and international media.

It’s almost certain of course that Air Asia did literally mean getting off a bus in Brisbane and then getting off a plane in Bangkok.

However, it does raise the question of whether the ads were developed centrally, or whether it had any local Australian input. If the latter, the hidden meaning behind the phrase should have been easy to spot.