The Campaign

#AirlineWager. A campaign that saw Air New Zealand and Qantas raising the stakes on one of the biggest sporting events of the year. With both airlines’ teams in the final, they had a wager over the outcome of the match via Twitter. The discussion between the brands and resulting pay-out went on to become a global news story.

Creative Execution

It all started with a tweet from Air New Zealand to Qantas - a wager over the result of the big game. Qantas agreed to partake, and in the days that followed Air New Zealand proposed to Qantas that if they lost they’d paint their planes black. Qantas replied with their own paint job suggestion and #AirlineWager began to trend globally. Fans got involved, and suggested their own outrageous ideas. But after some back-room negotiating, a more realistic, but equally humiliating pay out was agreed on - the losing staff, from ground crew to the captains would wear the winning team’s uniform the day after the match. The game was played, and New Zealand won. Qantas came good on the wager, sparking a second wave of global media coverage.

Despite being competitors, Qantas and Air New Zealand worked together to create a complimentary narrative to a global event. Together, they entered into the spirit of the game and the tournament, their efforts humanised their sponsorship of their sides. No longer were their names just printed on the jerseys of the teams, each party proved that they were truly fans and in doing so won admiration from the global rugby community. Both the exchange of tweets between the two brands, and the eventual outcome of the wager, were covered extensively both locally and globally - a $0 media spend garnering 2,300 mentions in mainstream media. 16.3 million impressions were recorded online in just one week. #AirlineWager trended on both Twitter and Facebook and reached over 2.5 million people in Australia and New Zealand through the airlines social media channels alone.

The Rugby World Cup is one of the 10 largest sporting events in the world. Sponsors jump at the chance to put their names to teams, with players selling a plethora of different products. To cut through this clutter, Air New Zealand needed an entertaining and engaging idea that complemented the narrative and entered into the spirit of this global event.

Twitter was the obvious choice for the conversation between the two brands given their relatively large following. The approach? To create a narrative that’d capture the imagination of both the global rugby loving public and the press. The resulting dialogue became the basis for news stories - publishers would literally play out the conversation as it happened. Speed was the name of the game, and this was genuinely done on the fly. It was an approach that gave the campaign momentum, as people were drawn in to see what happened next.