benchmark report
airline marketing
Delta ‘Social Magazine on Flipboard’
American Airlines ‘fake your British accent’ Following a contest in February of this year on video sharing app Vine, in which American Airlines challenged its fans and followers to make a 6-second Vine clip that tells why they deserved to f ly with the airline’s new B777-300ER to London, American Airlines has launched another Vine-based campaign. As AA is letting another of their brand new planes loose on a major route—in this case, from Los Angeles to LondonHeathrow—the airline is inviting Britons and Americans to make a shor t Vine video of themselves practicing their best American (if they are British) or British (if they are American) accent by saying the phrase “The #newAmerican is arriving. I want to f ly Los Angeles to London on the 777-300ER.” (or “London to Los Angeles” if they are from the UK.)
To enter, par ticipants have to follow @ AmericanAir on Twitter, tweet their Vine and include the #newAmerican hashtag. The contest closed on June 15 and the video explaining the campaign has been watched 8,000 times on YouTube so far. Vine was acquired by Twitter in 2012 and has about 20 million users and since recently is facing competition from Instagram (which in turn is owned by Facebook) who has just launched its own 15-second video tool.
Delta is coming up with innovative ways to communicate its renewed focus on a good night of sleep onboard. Earlier this year, the airline hosted a talk at the annual TED conference from renowned Oxford neuroscientist and sleep exper t Dr. Russell Foster addressing jet lag and how the eye tells time and demonstrate his research in action with a so-called ‘Photon Shower’ – a small light chamber that conference attendees could enter for a shor t period of time to help reset their body clocks through a personalized light treatment. Delta’s latest initiative sees Delta curating a ‘social magazine’ on Flipboard, the popular iOS and Android reading app. Called ‘The Science of Sleep’, the digital magazine is a compilation of sleep-related ar ticles that advises travellers on how to deal with insufficient sleep, par ticularly as
a consequence of excessive travelling. For example, one ar ticle gives ’12 simple tips to improve your sleep’, and another provides travellers with “a battle plan for jet lag.” As of the writing of this ar ticle, the magazine had already gained about 10,000 readers and had curated over 60 ar ticles that had witnessed over 130,000 page flips. Flipboard has received plaudits for its design and usability, which allows users to literally ‘flip’ the page to read news like a newspaper on their device. The free service currently has over 50 million users.
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