Most traditional marketers get that a social media video awareness has to be incorporated into creative output nowadays.
The generally younger populations that inhabit TikTok, Instagram & Youtube are the consumers most willing to part with their cash. Joe CEO knows that they are 'hip' and 'just love social media videos' with all the irreverence and joking and trolling. But he doesn't quite know how to execute it.
The recent Virgin & United airlines campaigns show how a brand can coopt a style, but a subtle change in approach can totally warp the brand's image.
United & Virgin are partner airlines in Australia, and it seems that the United Airlines 'Good Leads the Way' campaign, which is fully shot in smartphone style with behind the scenes team stories, has influenced the local Australian campaign for Virgin.
Virgin, though, have decided to take traditional TV commercial production values and have actors dressed as runway staff dancing and goofing off. The spot that results from this small change creates the impression of an airline that is staffed by a pack of clowns.
Style takeaway:
United = candid, happy teams, work hard/ play hard
Virgin = clowns who will probably loose luggage or worse
The meaning of what are essentially very similar narrative jumping-off points is completely changed by the shoot aesthetic changing from 'on an iPhone' to 'using a traditional film camera'.
The real danger here is that airlines have a certain code for how to make campaigns lighter, or to make them jump out of the screen more: You cannot do anything that, in the unfortunate event of a crash, would make an airline look lax or, worse still, culpable. Customers will take even longer to return if the advertising underscores liability.
So you get the famous 1989 British airways campaign which doesn't show a single plane, and Turkish Airlines celebrity buffoonery with Kevins Spacey & Costner. They have fun, but they never allow for a retrospective 'gotcha' moment.
Very close in tone to the Virgin spot is the Air New Zealand 'Great Christmas Chase' from last year, which shows a staff member dodging & diving her way through an airport to return a forgotten item. Importantly, this never shows fooling about near a plane or, gasp, on the actual tarmac, and it has an obvious brand takeaway of 'customer service comes first'.
There's also the little matter of branding. Airlines generally play the long game - they don't want a simple short term spike in ticket sales, they want 'brand uplift', they want to become a brand of choice when people see rows of tiny icons lined up together on a screen.
I worked with Jetstar & Lufthansa out of Japan for a few years and there was a drive to make travel brands socially savvy from as early as 2008, but the core brand messages were always sacrosanct - a guiding light.
I have to say I have no idea what the core brand proposition of Virgin is after seeing this campaign in the wild a few times. Seems like it could be a 'no other airline owns fun yet' approach.
The reason airlines don't aim to 'own fun' is that air travel is rarely fun. The reality of using the service nearly always contradicts the promise of the ad.
Travel is typically a series of hurdles : jumping through security hoops, parking fees, excess baggage fees, long waits in dreary, echoey spaces, and delayed take-offs.
The best you can hope for from an airline is that they are so good that they're invisible - the most frictionless part of the journey.
But, by all means Virgin, try to own 'fun'.
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