The Campaign

With little budget, we needed to get our loyal Kiwi fan base talking, both at home and abroad. Fortunately, national pride runs high down south, and there’s nothing Kiwis love more than talking about, well… themselves. After all, from our rebel Prime Minister David Lange to our indomitable All Blacks, New Zealand has a long history of being the underdog, of going against the grain and punching above our weight. So what better way of raising Kiwi pride over Christmas than by showing how our tiny country could impact the biggest, most complex organisation in the world – Santa’s Workshop.

Creative Execution

We created ‘A Very Merry Mistake’ – an online film that celebrated a particularly distinctive, and notoriously confusing quality of New Zealanders – their accents. More specifically, an accent that proved particularly troublesome for the one person who can’t afford any misunderstandings over Christmas – Santa. Our online film showed Santa and his elves struggling with New Zealand’s not-quite English. Fortunately, Air New Zealand, those experts in all things Kiwi, were on hand to save Christmas, translating the requests from down South. But the campaign didn’t end there. Through a social promo that showcased our global network, we got Santa’s hilariously mis-made toys, from Puggy Banks to Biscuit Balls and Ear Planes, into the hands of children young and old, all over the world. And to continue our helping hand, lighthearted extension videos offered pronunciation tutorials to help the world understand the unique Kiwi accent.

‘A Very Merry Mistake’ proved a very big success. Our online film received a 10/10 Facebook relevancy score, and, in the first 10 hours, with $0 spent on media, our social audience spread our film far and wide generating: • 670,000 organic views • 2.5 million organic reach • 92,000 engagements, 20k shares, 25k Facebook reactions By the end of the first week we had achieved: 10.3 million views (Target of 6m) #1 trending on YouTube 22 million reach 553,000 engagements 384 million PR reach

A Very Merry Mistake was created to entertain our highly engage social audience. Christmas is when every brand is trying to get their brand message across. With a much smaller budget than our competitors, we needed a campaign that would become part of popular culture and inspire our audience to share our message far and wide.

Creating global noise with minimal budget over the busiest time of year is no small feat. But fortunately, Air New Zealand had a secret weapon – a highly engaged social fanbase of New Zealanders both at home and abroad. We needed a socially-driven campaign that would powerfully resonate with our Kiwi audience, so they would share it far and wide, while still appealing to the global audience it would amplify out to. Our strategy, therefore, was to show our uniquely Kiwi take on Christmas. Because, just like our airline, New Zealanders do things a little different, and that makes all the difference.