Agency Enters Virgin Territory in Airline Ads
First there were automobile ads that didn’t show cars. Now along comes an airline with ads that show baby carriages and Christmas trees--but few signs of travel.
Virgin Atlantic Airways recently began to barrage the Los Angeles market with a new print, billboard and television ad campaign, but don’t look for any jets. The closest thing that viewers will see in any of the ads is a paper glider that comes flying out of a baby carriage in one TV spot.
The unusual campaign is an attempt by tiny Virgin Atlantic to gain attention in one of the world’s most competitive air travel markets--Los Angeles. Starting May 16, the airline will begin flying daily round-trip, nonstop flights from Los Angeles to London for $499.
“We’re a little guy in a business inhabited by mega-carriers,” said David Tait, executive vice president of Virgin. “This campaign is our 2-by-4-over-the-head approach. Once we get the consumers’ attention, we can start softening the approach.”
The airline--which owns fewer than a dozen jets--has a Southern California advertising budget of just $2 million. So it is trying to gain attention in Los Angeles with ads that look totally unlike those conventional airline advertisements that feature smiling flight attendants.
Virgin, which flaunts the advertising slogan, “The entertainment capital of the sky,” prides itself on in-flight entertainment. This includes a wide-ranging choice of meals and movies on all flights, not to mention 12 music channels on its high-tech stereo headsets.
Virgin’s mission to entertain has earned it enthusiastic support from younger travelers who would rather see music videos on the in-flight movie screen then yesterday’s news summaries. But sometimes the airline’s urge to entertain gets a little wacky. On one Easter Day flight from New York to London several years ago, passengers were handed crayons, scissors and cardboard so they could make cardboard Easter eggs and bonnets.
Entertainment offerings like these will be highlighted in upcoming ads created by the New York agency Korey, Kay & Partners.
But Virgin’s very first print ad in Los Angeles, which ran in several newspapers last week, left many readers perplexed. That ad, which had no headline, showed a metal foot-measuring device commonly used in shoe stores. Although the ad never mentions Richard Branson--the brash British founder of Virgin Atlantic--by name, it implies that he has made life so miserable for the competition that one airline executive finally quit to become a shoe salesman.
“I can’t imagine that they’d get one call based on that ad,” said Arlynn Whittaker, senior vice president of marketing at Admarketing, the Los Angeles agency that formerly created ads for AirCal and MGM Grand Air. But Virgin claims that it is receiving up to 1,000 extra calls a day since its campaign began in Los Angeles.
Whittaker, however, said she is much more impressed with Virgin’s upcoming ads. So is Peter Stranger, president of the Los Angeles office of Della Femina, McNamee WCRS. “If the ads are arresting enough to suck people into the body copy, that’s all that is needed.”
These ads will detail Virgin’s veritable three-ring circus of in-flight entertainment. First-class passengers, for example, can select from 50 movies to personally view during the flight.
One new ad features a uniformed British schoolboy who has an iron ball and chain strapped to his foot. “At age 15, his headmaster said he’d either wind up rich or in prison,” the ad states in reference to Branson, the airline’s 38-year-old founder. “He founded Virgin Records. Virgin Music. Virgin Video. And two of London’s hottest dance clubs. From a man who knows a thing or two about entertainment comes entertainment in its highest form.”
“Our single mission is to build awareness,” said Michael Glavin, vice president of Korey Kay. “If people just look at the ads and ask, ‘Who are these guys?’ that’s all we want.”
