The Arrivals - Cover image
The Arrivals - Cover image

The Arrivals

Scandinavian Airlines (SAS)

‘The Arrivals’ was a total theatre of campaign orchestration. Marketing-, media-, comms. and PR strategy worked in unison in order for the target group to experience one whole brand story. And it was all orchestrated with a narrow effectiveness focus.

‘The Arrivals’ set out to reinforce SAS’ position as a premium airline and exceeded the primary objective: increase willingness-to-pay. The KPI underpinning SAS’ success in a market as saturated and competitive as commercial aviation.

The Challenge

The story of ‘The Arrivals’ is a story about consistency in marketing and brand building efforts. A story that began with the introduction of the ‘We Are Travelers’ brand platform in 2014.

This solid long-term focus was why the challenge in 2018, was inherently still the same.

‘The Arrivals’ was the 7th large scale brand campaign under the ‘We Are Travelers’ platform, but the second to include a social dimension following ‘Travelers are the Future’ in 2017. Previous campaigns had been executed with a more traditional distribution mindset.

SAS didn’t set out to turn something around but to make another great stride in a long run.

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The Solution

To win this audience, it is particularly important for SAS to reinforce the main category drivers in order to achieve long term effectiveness targets and willingness-to-pay. These drivers of price premium were identified with the development of the brand platform 5 years ago.

The community feeling is what ties travelers together. Travelers’ are a certain breed because they know the world and feel local in many places. But it was time to explore different sides of this feeling. And look into what traveling does for you as a person.

And while SAS moves people physically, every journey also has a mental aspect to it; new experiences and new places spawn new ideas that we take back with us. Hence, our key creative insight became that ‘going places takes us places’.

The arrival hall is a magical place, where the ‘changed you’ re-enters the world, that you – for a while, at least – left behind.

That is why we wanted to observe and show the reencounters between loved ones in the airport arrival hall. To visualize exactly how travelers return home a little changed.

The film was captured from three special-built towers equipped with spy-glass-windows, which were placed in the arrival hall of Copenhagen Airport, over a four-day period.

We initiated and aligned the marketing-, media-, and PR strategy simultaneously, in order for the target group to experience one whole brand story.

The campaign consisted of 3 campaign bursts. All of these included the main film and one new hero element that would engage the target audience in new ways within our frame of unfolding the emotional journey of a traveler.

The campaign planning was done side by side with the creative ideation in order to make sure that creativity, context and distribution was supporting one another.

The Result

The campaign received an overwhelming response. With more than 40 million views, including 74% organic reach on Facebook, it received more than 1.1 million social reactions and more than 238.000 shares on Facebook. That the film resonated, was clearly evident in our campaign-results, which all exceeded our initial campaign-KPI’s.

  • The campaign drove price-premium 12 percentage- points above the original goal.

  • The image-effect exceeded the original campaign goal of 7 percentage-points.

  • And finally, the total campaign liking amounted 17 percentage-points above the initial campaign-KPI. The highest campaign liking result ever measured for SAS.