Delivering brand fame for Virgin Australia

Challenge

To deliver brand fame and mass awareness for the Virgin Australia brand and highlight the key differentiators of the airline’s award winning loyalty program, Velocity Frequent Flyer.

Culture

Knowing that Australians view their pets as family members and in recognition of the 30,000 cats and dogs that fly with Virgin Australia each year, Velocity launched Australia’s first frequent flyer program for pets in 2014. Pulse saw this as a differentiator and something that could be celebrated to answer the brief.

Creativity

Using April Fools Day as a unique opportunity to deliver brand fame in a fun, cheeky and relevant way, we created a social content driven campaign announcing the world’s first pet lounge. The role of the content was not only to drive share-ability and customer advocacy across all of Virgin Australia’s owned channels but remind frequent flyers of the benefits of Virgin Australia’s loyalty program and the fact that pets can earn points when they fly. The video created was a teaser inside look at the world’s first pet lounge, highlighting the superior level of service of the airline provides and the premium services available to member’s of Velocity.

Clout

The video, which was released across all owned channels on April Fools Day garnered more than 300,000 views in the first 48 hours, was shared by Richard Branson and was picked up by major broadcasters across Australia including Channel 10 The Project, Channel 7 News and Sky News. The content was also included in a number of best April Fools campaigns round ups including News.com.au and the Sydney Morning Herald. Separately the video made global headlines appearing on Good Morning America, CBS, Fox and CTV in Canada. Traffic to the Virgin Australia Velocity website jumped by 40% on the week of launch.