Brief Explanation

As a premium airline Cathay Pacific has a reputation in its home market for unaffordability, especially amongst students! Coupled with this is a cynical consumption of traditional advertising amongst youth. With a minimal budget we needed a way to get into the students daily lives that didn’t feel like advertising. We needed to be a little more like youth – spontaneous, hip, trend-conscious.

The Brief

Cathay Pacific had never targeted a youth audience for any promotion. And it was time to break into this important audience segment. Rather than using traditional advertising, we needed a way to connect with youth that made Cathay’s range of destination offers feel more relevant to their lifestyle. The key measureables were ticket sales and sign-ups for Asia Miles loyalty club membership.

How the final design was conceived

To symbolize the “grab it and go” nature of the ticket promotion, and to connect with these fashion-conscious kids, we chose to use a Travel Tote Bag as the marketing medium. Each “Bag of Desire” carried a unique destination design created by one of Hong Kong’s most popular young designers. Students could claim their free tote bag at a series of “Pop Up” stores on University campuses, once they had signed up for Asia Miles. But that’s not all – we also created keyword stamps for the students to be able to customize their bags with their own personality.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

More popular and successful than we could have imagined! 8200 sign-ups and 4000 youth-discount tickets sold, exceeding our KPIs by 1000%. But, even better than that, 5000 billboards walking around the city.