China Airlines - Souvenirs from Travel

Broadly speaking, airline marketing campaigns tend to go in one of two directions. You either focus on the product, so you emphasise how wonderful different elements such as the aircraft, the cabins or the in-flight service are.

Or you focus on the overall experience, from the destination to the transformative power of travel.

Emirates is an example of an airline which takes the former approach. Recent campaigns have promoted everything from the Emirates economy cabin, to the in flight entertainment system.

Lufthansa is an example of an airline which took the latter approach in its 2018 ‘Say yes to the world’ campaign (see our March 2018 edition).

China Airlines has likewise (via its ad agency Leo Burnett Taiwan) come out with a campaign looking how travel can change you. However the direction it takes is very different to what you generally see from an airline.

Gone are the life affirming and positive messages. Instead we get a brutally honest and sometimes funny look at some of the unexpected results of a trip abroad.

The video, ‘Souvenirs from Travel’, features a collection of Taiwanese travellers who have just returned from foreign destinations, showing some of the more unexpected results of their trips.

This includes a couple awkwardly shaking hands at the airport post a quickie Las Vegas wedding, a woman who no longer looks like her ID photo, after having had plastic surgery in Seoul, and a man who finds the tattoo he had done in Amsterdam.

In tone and style, it's quite a bit different and a radical departure from standard airline ads, which has resulted in quite a lot of coverage for the airline and ad agency Leo Burnett.

One Mile at a Time talks about “China Airlines brilliantly unconventional new ad”, while Gabriel Leigh in Forbes says that it has all the ingredients of a great, viral ad in that it shows the airline as being human and honest in being able to laugh about something.

Despite the unintended consequences of travel that were shown, it also made the writer more likely to want to travel.

According to Branding in Asia the video netted almost nine million views in the first two weeks of release, with 9,000 shares and over 4,000 comments.

As well as the critical acclaim and large number of video views, we noticed that some of the media coverage mentions that China Airlines has improved over the years, and highlights Taiwan as a destination, both of which will undoubtedly please both the airline and agency.