The Campaign

Through an integrated campaign featuring content, social, digital and print; we introduced Qantas staff across different parts of the business who contribute to the overall journey and experience of flying. A national search and hours of interviews, we found four employees with real and compelling stories that we were confident would translate on screen and in multiple channels. There was a familiarity and ease in each of the employees and this was an intrinsic quality we wanted to harness in order to represent the spirit of Qantas. Our approach was to create emotive content that captured the staff both inside and outside of the work environment. This allowed us to show them pursuing their outside interests, and by observing these unseen moments, we were able to highlight the individual and their emotional connection to their role at Qantas; it was not simply a job, but a responsibility.

Creative Execution

Using real human stories of Qantas staff, we drew out the passion, attention to detail, and pride they put into their jobs; an unequivocal drive to make every aspect of Qantas service best in class, ultimately bringing the spirit of Qantas to life. We wanted to move audiences; make them smile, make them cry, essentially allow them to engage and come to know the Qantas staff not as a baggage handler, engineer, lounge manager and pilot; but as Rachel, Egon, Jennifer and George. These little moments demonstrated how the breadth of very different people of differing occupations and passions shared the single goal of working to create a journey. The focus and execution here was to unveil an intimate insight of people who make Qantas the Spirit of Australia.

The campaign performed significantly above industry benchmarks for online communications, successfully communicating the rational benefits of Qantas’ increased investment, and put pride into the brand. Metric/Result Recognition20% Branding75% Cut-through15% Positive Feelings about the airline62% Makes me want to fly the airline46.75% Our launch drove interest and awareness of the hero stories with high impact display, Instagram takeovers, and programmatic for maximum effect.As the campaign continued, our objective shifted from impact to engagement with the authenticity and realness of Qantas staff through emotive media channels and experiences.In this way with a long tail, we were able to extend the impact of the campaign to ultimately stimulate people’s curiosity and create an emotional connection to Qantas.An important secondary benefit of the campaign was an internal motivational piece for Qantas employees. Heroing our people in the campaign was a demonstration of the key role they play in the business and in delivering great flying experience for our customers.

Fiercely Competitive Category, Highly Promiscuous Customers In such an environment, heavy price promotions from competitors meant consumers were increasingly falling into the ‘switchers’ camp – with memberships to multiple loyalty programs allowing them to pick and choose their airline based on the best price available. Switchers Unconvinced Yet, there was still a portion of the flying population that weren’t brand loyal. A gap analysis was completed to identify areas of opportunity based on operational performance vs brand perception. Areas of strength for Qantas were its people, booking and check-in experience, lounges – no surprises there. Our target audience were switchers - those flyers not yet bonded to Qantas and who are happy to fly any airline based on price or schedule. By targeting non-committal flyers not yet bonded to, we would focus on the very best qualities of the flying experience in order to build brand loyalty to Qantas over other airlines.