Lufthansa may soon have a new agency. The business is currently handled by McCann Berlin, which is defending. The other finalists are BBDO, Schulz & Friends, and Serviceplan Group. Final presentations apparently took place two weeks ago.
It’s been about a month now since British Airways dropped this spot, but it has such an epic quality that I think I can still post it. The spot is actually running on broadcast television, at least in New York, leading to the strange experience of seeing two spots for two different major airlines (BA and Delta) in the same hour of television. It’s been many, many years since that was a common occurrence; is it possible airline ad spending is coming back? And speaking of old-school advertising, how about a campaign once again focusing on pilots?
Last week, Qantas shocked the industry (and passengers) by grounding its fleet and locking out its employees. Now Qantas is flying again — but it’s flying into more crowded skies.
In the past three days, two of Qantas’s competitors have launched new low-cost brands. On Tuesday, Singapore Airlines introduced Scoot. Then, on Thursday, Australia’s Strategic Airlines unveiled its new name, Air Australia, and a new, low-cost focus. Air Australia’s new livery is pictured above. As an act of mercy, I am saving Scoot’s for after the jump.
Jazz, the brand formed by Air Canada in 2001 to consolidate its regional carriers, has flown its last flight. It was 10 years old.
Starting today, Jazz flights will be flown under the name Air Canada Express. The Air Canada Express name is already being used for flights to Montreal from Toronto City Airport, which are operated by a different company.
If the new brand sounds an awful lot like the name of a U.S. regional carrier, that’s not an accident. Air Canada’s strategy for its feeders is coming to resemble the American model of regional services like U.S. Airways Express, Continental Express, and United Express (see the connection?) The Air Canada Express brand will in fact cover flights operated by five different companies, none of them owned by Air Canada.
Today marks the first anniversary of Branded Skies’ first post, “In the pursuit of flying turtles.” It’s been a pretty decent year for the airline industry. Profits are up at many carriers, although oil prices make the future uncertain. A number of airlines have also launched new campaigns in the past 12 months, Delta, JetBlue, Finnair, and Singapore Airlines among them. I don’t have access to figures, but I suspect media spending is up considerably.
As for Branded Skies, it turns out one of the best ways to learn about something is to write about it until you know it. I’ve learned a lot about airline branding in the past 12 months, and I look forward to learning more in the next 12 months.
According to Advertising Age, United Continental Holdings is looking for a new advertising agency. The article doesn’t say whether Kaplan Thaler Group (Continental) or Barrie D’Rozario Murphy (United) will be participating in the review. Combined spending for the two airlines was $63.2 million in measured media in 2010, although the vast majority of that came from Continental.
Further confounding my theory that Air Canada is the Liberal airline and Canadian (or WestJet) is the Conservative airline, for this election campaign, the Liberals have leased an American plane from a carrier based in Calgary, and the Conservatives have leased a French plane from a carrier based in Montreal. Go figure.
If you’re on Facebook, chances are you’ve seen your friends liking AAdvantage this week — that is, if you didn’t like it yourself. American is running a promotion in which everyone who likes the Facebook page of its frequent flier program will win between 100 and 100,000 miles.
Unsurprisingly, participation has been high. In a few days, the page has jumped from about 2,500 likes to 227,301. But American is basically buying fans, and that can get expensive. If we are to accept a
All this means it’s too early to call the program a resounding success, notwithstanding its early impressive numbers. AAdvantage has a whole bunch of fairly expensive new Facebook fans now; the question is what they’ll do with them. The challenge is that social media is a little like herding goldfish. People have very short attention spans. There’s nothing to stop them from unliking the page now that they have their miles, or removing its updates from their feeds, or simply ignoring it.
The number I’d really like to see is how many people opened AAdvantage accounts to take advantage (sorry) of the contest. I did; up until now, I’ve collected most of my miles through Delta SkyMiles and Aeroplan. Getting people to click “Like” on Facebook is one thing; getting them to sign up for a frequent flier program is another, probably much more valuable thing.
(And this, incidentally, is why it seems crazy to me that the URLs from the Facebook page to the AAdvantage enrollment page don’t seem to have any sort of token that would allow them to track how many people they’re driving to join. But that’s getting a little technical.)
In any event, clearly American is going big into social media. It should be fascinating to see how it does.
Singapore Airlines launched a new advertising campaign featuring the famous Singapore Girl. The television spot is beautifully shot although I think it would make people feel a bit uneasy coming from a Western carrier. SIA also posted four“makingof”videos, which aren’t particularly insightful really. Thanks to Simpliflying, which also has an in-depth interview with SIA’s VP of Public Affairs about the campaign.
Fly the Branded Skies celebrates the past of airline branding and contemplates the future, from the perspective of Cameron Fleming, an advertising copywriter in New York. See how it all started »
Follow @brandedskies for updates. The opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my agency or its clients.
