Airline Marketing Benchmark Report February 2014

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airline marketing

FEBRUARY 2014 ISSUE

A monthly selection of the most innovative marketing campaigns launched by airlines around the world SimpliFlying | airlinetrends.com February 2OI4 Issue 18

benchmark report

airline marketing

welcome.

Published by market research agency airlinetrends.com and aviation marketing strategy consulting firm SimpliFlying, the Airline Marketing Benchmark Repor t contains a wide range of airline marketing case studies each month, providing you with the latest and most innovative social, digital, experiential and traditional airline marketing campaigns recently launched by airlines around the world.

Whether you’re looking for inspiration or are eager to help your airline move into the nex t stage of engagement, while also understanding how your airline marketing initiatives compare to campaigns from competitors in general, these repor ts are indispensable for airline professionals working in the f ield of marketing and corporate communications. The monthly repor ts also help agencies that work with airlines stay on top of the latest innovative airline marketing initiatives.

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experiential

For any questions about the repor t, please contact Shubhodeep Pal at shubhodeep@simplif lying.com.

As innovative campaigns come in all shapes and sizes, the Airline Marketing Benchmark Repor t is categorized into the following four themes:

Faced with ever more experienced consumers, who routinely ignore the commercials and ads thrown at them, airline brands are finding new ways to break through the adver tising clutter to connect with consumers.

social

Besides engaging their online audience via Facebook and Twitter-based campaigns, the airline industry is also busy experimenting with new social media platforms.

digital

With the huge popularity of smar tphones and tablets, airlines are tapping into these digital platforms to engage consumers, as well as releasing videos online which they hope will go viral.

traditional

Despite the current focus on social, digital and experiential campaigns, airlines continue to serve up creative, traditional media-based, initiatives in order to reach a mass audience.

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experiential

cross-media

lounge dortmund

new year’s gift

TURKISH AIRLINES

Turkish Airways has just launched a new branded VIP lounge at Signal Iduna Park, home of German top soccer team Borussia Dor tmund. This follows a recent trend of airlines opening branded lounges at spor ts venues, such as Emirates and Delta ‘brand spaces ’ at Real Madrid and Chelsea FC. The 430sqm ‘Lounge Dortmund ’ can seat up to 200 of the football club’s spectator-box guests and business par tners, and has been designed to reflect the atmosphere of THY’s International CIP Lounge at Istanbul Atatürk Airpor t, featuring spanning arches and rich colour palettes. As well as comfor table seating areas, guests are provided with an array of food and drink, which include a selection of Turkish desser ts, coffees and traditional Turkish

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LUFTHANSA TURKEY

tea, served by staff wearing the Turkish Airlines cabin crew uniform, reinforcing the airline experience at the stadium.

The new lounge acts as the first ‘physical’ product of THY’s par tnership with Dor tmund. Since the beginning of the current Bundesliga season, Turkish Airlines has been the Premium Airline Par tner of Borussia Dor tmund and flies the team to all international tournaments and matches.

The par tnership also covers adver tising in and outside the stadium, as well as joint promotional activities and events.

Lufthansa Turkey has challenged Istanbul-based urban and guerilla marketing agency Japonlar to come up with a creative way to gather email addresses of potential airline passengers.

Japonlar came up with a concept that saw the airline develop 10,000 postcards that were distributed on the streets of Istanbul to passers-by by Lufthansa pseudo-cabin crew, in return for their personal contact details.

To create a point of difference in the campaign, the agency embraced the notion that less postcards were being sent compared to the past, due to the rise in social media and digital communication. To help generate desire for the postcards, Japonlar created a postcard that also turns into a balsa wood toy plane that allows people

to deliver their new year’s greetings in a different, longer lasting, and fun way.

Two host and hostess teams distributed the postcards on December 21-22 at popular spots around Istanbul as a new year’s gift from Lufthansa and in total thousands of e-mail addresses were collected in return for a wooden ‘planecard’. As people were asked for their contact information, they were informed about a discount coupon for future f lights, which they could receive via a QR code on the card.

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25-hour flight simulator

#manvsplane BRITISH AIRWAYS

In July 2013, British Airways created an online video that featured South African rugby player Bryan Habana (who once famously raced a cheetah) racing against a BA A380 taking off on a runway. The purpose of this video clip was to highlight the carrier’s plan to launch the A380 superjumbo on the London-Johannesburg route, which will commence on February 12th 2014. Amassing just shor t of 2 million YouTube hits since it was broadcast, BA has fur ther developed the successful campaign to celebrate its f irst A380 f light to the African continent.

On January 10th 2014, Bryan Habana personally answered (on behalf of BA) critics of the YouTube video who stated that the challenge looked too easy, challenging them to take on the

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SILK AIR

race themselves. Selected by BA, 5 applicants will now be given the chance to run against the plane when it star ts f lying to South Africa. To apply contestants had to write in 50 words why they deserved the chance to race the airline’s newest aircraft type.

The handful of winners will be f lown, cour tesy of BA, to South Africa to par take in the event and the winner with the fastest time earns a pair of tickets in BA’s Club World business class anywhere on the airline’s A380 network, which currently spans from London to LA, Hong Kong and Johannesburg.

Marking its 25th year anniversary celebrations, Singapore Airlines’s regional subsidiary SilkAir has just took delivery of the f irst of its new f leet of 54 Boeing 737’s in early February 2014. In a bid to win over consumers and involve them in SilkAir’s historic Boeing delivery, the airline will bring fans and aviation followers together to ‘virtually deliver ’ the new aircraft to Singapore in a 25hour f light simulator event.

Called ‘Bringing Boeing Home with SilkAir ’ the event will allow up to 150 selected members of the public to f ly a simulated ‘SilkAir’ Boeing 737-800 plane that will track the actual delivery route from the Boeing Renton factory in Seattle to Singapore’s Changi Airpor t via Honolulu, Majuro and Guam.

The par ticipants (and their par tners) will take off, f ly a scenic circuit around one of the four destinations the aircraft will land at en-route, and then land at the same airpor t again. The experience and destination depends on the time slot chosen - timed to coincide with the realworld f light.

The vir tual delivery event will take place overnight on the 7th and 8th of February 2014 at Flight Experience Singapore which is located in the hear t of Singapore.

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chinese new year

social

#eyfollowyou ETIHAD

In its latest social media campaign Etihad has mimicked a global Instagram phenomenon that originally has been started in 2011 by now famous Russian photographer and filmmaker Murad Osmann who has amassed a following of 750,000 on the instant-photo sharing site.

Osmann creatively documents his travels around the world with his girlfriend Nataly Zakharova leading the way in his ongoing series known as ‘Follow Me To ’.

Chronicling his adventures on Instagram, Osmann composes each shot in a similar fashion, with each landscape shot is taken from the photographer’s point of view with his extended hand holding onto his girlfriend’s in front of him using filters to give the pictures an artistic feel.

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BA GREATER CHINA

Using the hashtag #EYFollowYou , as a nod to the original title of the online phenonemon, Etihad asked their social media followers to post similar shots from their travels around the world as part of a Twitter-based competition .

The winner, announced on the 1st February was @lilou_dj who posted a shot of a girl leading the photographer to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.

British Airways and Social@Ogilvy Beijing have launched the airline’s first WeChat campaign to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year with the airline’s social media followers. Social@Ogilvy developed a festive campaign to lure the more than 350,000 existing BA followers on Sina Weibo to the airline’s newly launched presence on WeChat . Both these Chinese social platforms are hybrid versions of Twitter and Facebook and have hundreds of millions active users.

The campaign is based on the Chinese tradition of giving Hongbao (red envelopes filled with money) to friends and loved ones at new year, and BA gifted the first 2014 users to register on the official BA WeChat account @英国航空(BritishAirwaysChina) a specially branded envelope to mark the Year of the Horse.

The custom-made golden envelopes were then delivered physically to the doors of the first followers. Inside each envelope was a new year greeting from BA’s regional manager Tracy Dedman and a promotional coupon worth 300 RMB (50 USD) to be used for future flights on the airline. Three randomly selected followers also won roundtrip BA tickets for travel between China and London in their Hongbao.

The campaign ran between January 10 and 22, ahead of the Chinese New Year.

Following the success of this first WeChat campaign, which gained over 10,000 followers, BA says it is planning to develop more in-depth campaigns and services for its WeChat presence.

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ambassador of british etiquette

postkorts

BA GREATER CHINA

In another campaign that targets Chinese customers using social media, British Airways has taken on the self-appointed role as the ambassador of British etiquette . A series of humorous tongue-in-cheek online videos feature British celebrities talking about “Britishness” and what is likely to cause offense when Chinese people visit Britain.

As par t of the campaign British Airways has par tnered with China’s equivalent of LinkedIn, Ushi.com , to create an online dialogue around things that they believe interest Chinese people most about Britain – from golf, doing business, British education, to buying British real estate.

During last December, a series of online films featuring British personalities and celebrities was released each week.

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NORWEGIAN

These include golfer Justin Rose and British Airways CEO Keith Williams - each offering tips and advice and joining a conversation via an online Q&A that will then be shared across other Chinese social media platforms.

Says BA’s Regional General Manager Greater China, Tracy Dedman, “British etiquette is a key element of our country’s culture as well as an integral par t of what makes the service of British Airways unique.”

Norwegian, Europe’s third-largest low-cost airline, has par tnered with Postify Postcards to create an alternative marketing campaign that aims to be both fun and relevant to both the recipient and user, similar to Lufthansa’s postcard campaign in Istanbul (featured earlier in this month’s repor t).

Launched in mid-2013 (and still ongoing), Norwegian lets its passengers and social media fans customize their own postcard with digital images from their holiday and send it as a physical, printed, postcard to their friends or family, free of charge. When signing in via Norwegian’s Facebook and Instagram pages, users receive a voucher which they can use to send the free postcards in either a traditional A6 format, or the square

Instagram format, using the Postify mobile app .

For Norwegian, offering the 5,000 branded free cards is a thoughtful gift for travellers who want to surprise their friends and family, although the fact that the batch of 5,000 free cards is still available raises a question whether the campaign has been very popular indeed.

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twist the cookie

digital

selfshot

SOUTHWEST AIRLINES

America’s largest low-cost carrier Southwest has joined forces with another popular US brand, Oreo, to bring a sweepstakes competition to its social networks. This isn’t the f irst major brand collaboration for the airline in the past few months, as Southwest during the US holiday season teamed up with consumer brands including Dr. Pepper and Nintendo for joint marketing initiatives.

Southwest’s latest four-weekly collaboration comes as a competition that is based on the traditional way of eating Oreo cookies, that is separating the cookie to get at the cream inside. Every few days Southwest posted a virtual cookie on its Facebook site, asking its fans to to guess the city that was cryptically

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TURKISH AIRLINES

illustrated in the cream inside the cookie.

Each entrant could par ticipate once a week, in order to help them get closer to the prizes, which included a selection of round-trip Southwest tickets, a USD 500 Visa gift card, and a year’s supply of Oreo cookies.

We recently covered Turkish Airlines’ ‘Kobe vs Messi Shootout ’ commercial, which was the most successful YouTube airline video of 2013, reaching over 130 million views.

In the latest iteration of the campaign, THY has launched the ‘Selfshot ’ iPhone app, which can be downloaded for free from Apple’s app store. The app allows users to take their self ies (self portrait shot ) and combine them by choosing one of the destination ‘backgrounds’ featured in the commercial and share their ‘selfshot’ on social media, giving the illusion that they are actually in location, due to clever photomanipulating software embedded into the application.

#self ieshootout hashtag will also be available via the ‘Widen Your Self ie ’ microsite. The most liked and retweeted self ies which are taken with the app and shared on social media over a 3 month period, will receive one roundtrip ticket from Turkish Airlines.

THY’s ‘Selfshot’ campaign mirrors previous airline campaigns that tap into the popular self ie trend, such as Malaysia Airlines’ ‘Snap Self ie, Take Bestie ’ and Virgin America’s ‘Summer of Self ies ’.

Self ies that are posted using the

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mobile freebies

#goldluck kiosk

KLM & JAL

DELTA

As airlines invest and develop their mobile phone applications they are increasingly promoting the new functionality of their mobile apps, in order to increase the adoption by passengers. Besides print ads or online videos (see this Air France video for example), airlines such as KLM and JAL have also come up with ‘mobile freebies’.

Japan Airlines, meanwhile, incentivized the use of its ‘touch & go ’ self-service check-in and boarding service called ‘QuiC’. Launched in October last year, passengers who use the QuiC service can either print out their barcode at home or use the barcode (or NFC chip) on their mobile phone to go through security and self-board on domestic flights.

In early December 2013, KLM offered users in Hong Kong, Singapore, Norway and the USA of its new mobile flight booking functionality a free mobile phone charger (whilst stocks lasted). Customers booking a ticket via the KLM mobile app received an email from KLM with instructions on how to claim their free gift. In total, over 14,000 flights were booked via the KLM mobile app during the monthlong campaign and all the mobile chargers were given away.

Between January and March 2014, when the barcode or NFC chip is scanned at the gate, QuiC users will receive a printed boarding information slip which on the back contains a coupon for a free McDonalds breakfast or cheeseburger and fries to be used at all McDonalds outlets in Japan.

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Acting as the off icial airline of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA), Delta during the run-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi has provided ski and snowboard fans with an oppor tunity to wish the USSA athletes ‘#GoldLuck’ on the world’s biggest winter spor ts stage.

During December and January, Delta has placed Delta #GoldLuck venues at USSA qualif ication events in Colorado, Utah and California where fans could record a ten-second personalized video message in a mobile video unit and share them via Facebook and Twitter. The main objective of the campaign – and purpose of all of the videos assembled and broadcast on Delta’s Facebook page – was to serve as motivation for the athletes in their endeavor to qualify

for a place in the USSA for Sochi.

During the events, US skiing athletes, such as professional snowboarder and 2010 Olympic Team member Louie Vito helped host the #GoldLuck events, greeting fans and helping them create their #GoldLuck videos. Besides the mobile video units that were placed at USSA Olympic qualifying events, Delta also placed #GoldLuck booths at select airpor ts during the month of January.

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traditional

cloud ads AIR FRANCE UK

To celebrate its 80th anniversary and promote a new range of low fares for 2014, Air France opted to break away from traditional advertising and turned its eye to the sky. In the UK, the airline gained approval from the Civil Aviation Authority to create its very own laser light show that was beamed onto the clouds over some of London’s (and other major city’s) most iconic locations.

Working with agencies Curb and CMT Events, Air France outfitted a traditional ‘black cab’ with powerful projectors that could project images of an airplane, the brand’s logo, and the promotion’s hashtag (#AirFranceSky) directly onto the sky. The first of the overhead projections took place on January 7th at London’s Waterloo station, with others following over a 3 week period at Air France’s regional destinations Birmingham,

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EASYJET

Manchester and Edinburgh –with each laser projection lasting around two and a half hours (video here ).

Air France also ran a Twitter-based competition that gave one lucky UK winner two long-haul tickets on any Air France destination, and the opportunity to see their suggested message in the sky.

Participants had to follow @AirFranceUK on Twitter and tweet the airline what they would like to write in the sky, accompanied with the hashtag #AirFranceSky.

In the past years, easyJet – European second largest LCC – has stepped up efforts to target business travellers, rolling out a series of new products and services aimed at this lucrative segment. According to the airline, 18 percent of easyJet’s passengers were flying on business during 2013.

As part of this focus, easyJet has been running its ‘Business by easyJet’ campaign for some time, and the latest latest development for the campaign sees the airline using gently provocative slogans to target today’s “new wave of business travellers,” as the airline puts it.

The new posters, which can be found inside UK hub London Gatwick airport, promotes the airline as a savvy choice of airline when travelling for work, and is aimed at the self-titled ‘smart traveller’. The tone of

voice attacks the old-fashioned notion of exclusivity that surrounds business travel. For example, one of the posters uses the phrase ‘The Old Boys Club is closed until further notice ’ and the other ‘Bye Invitation only ’ and sits alongside the broader further reaching multi-platform ‘Generation easyJet’ campaign launched in September last year.

This isn’t easyJet’s first advertising campaign slogan aimed at attacking the legacy carrier travel experience. In previous campaigns, the airline has been setting itself apart from their main UK competitor BA, using phrases such as ‘A Free flight if you’re late, or sweet B.A?’ and ‘To Fly. To Save’, which was a direct comparison against British Airways’ ‘To Fly. To Serve.’ slogan.

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controversial tv ad ALL NIPPON AIRWAYS

Japanese airline All Nippon Airways has announced it will change its latest TV commercial following complaints that it used racist stereotypes of Western Europeans. The TV spot was intended to promote ANA’s expanded international flight schedule from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.

The commercial , which first aired on January 18th, shows two Japanese men in company uniform discussing how they can make All Nippon Airways more successful as an ‘international carrier’.

One suggests that they should change the image of Japanese people. The image then switches back to the other man, who is now wearing a blond wig and a fake long nose. Both these traits are considered to be characteristics of Western Europeans.

In another version of the ad, one man

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surprises his companion by offering to hug him. Public displays of affection, especially between men, are uncommon in Japan.

According to an ANA spokesperson, 3 days after the launch, customers - mostly foreigners in Japan - complained about the ad, and ANA has responded by changing part of the commercial. Meanwhile, before the spot was taken off ANA’s YouTube account, it had already received over 490,000 views. Although perceived as negative publicity, the coverage of the controversy has been global, and unintentionally has increased the exposure of the airline through international media.

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benchmark report

A monthly selection of the most innovative marketing campaigns launched by airlines around the world

airline marketing benchmark report airline marketing

SimpliFlying | airlinetrends.com of the most A monthly selection August 2013 campaigns innovative marketing around the world launched by airlines

At SimpliFlying, we believe in thinking differently about aviation marketing. We thrive at the intersection of aviation and marketing, and in the past four years have advised over 30 airlines and airports on customer engagement and marketing strategy. Our growing clientele includes Airbus, LATAM Airlines, Turkish Airlines, Toronto Pearson and more.

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