It's my first time celebrating Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere and to be frank, it's a bit tough to get swept up in the standard December cheer and emotion with all this sunshine and talk of barbecues. But Air New Zealand pulled on my holiday heart strings in a short YouTube pre-roll video titled: "Summer Wonderland". They mixed in the right amount of humour, clever marketing and brand recognition to catch my attention - definitely worth having a look:
Take a moment to appreciate that rather than creating a "come fly with Air New Zealand" jingle, the brand put their budget into creating a great tune that people actually want to share with friends or around the family table. This is a wonderful spin on word-of-mouth marketing.
The campaign rolled out in several forms across the Air New Zealand social media channels. Each channel offered unique content that built on the campaign video.
To capture interested fans and move them through the sales funnel, the song and the song sheets are available for download through major app stores and Spotify. They also created a clean and simple micro-site to house the primary campaign content which you can find here: http://www.airnzchristmas.co.nz
A few takeaways for destination and outdoor marketers:
- Brands creating holiday content shouldn't just create it just to fill the calendar. That type of content easily gets lost. Create content that is less about the product and more about the feeling: Make it clever and share-worthy.
- Create a variety of campaign assets such as candid images, video clips and other behind the scenes content in order to share different content on each channel. This assigns value to each social media channel and encourages movement across platforms with your fans. If you feel compelled by a single piece, It's instinctual to want to discover the full story.
- Surprise and delight. Any campaign can have a video and some supporting images but offering a free downloadable song and song sheet disrupts the status quo. This campaign gets people talking.
