Catch a Flight to Buenos Aires
Edelweiss Air
Issue 54 | March 2020
Agency
thjnk Zu¨rich
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Alexander Jaggy Creative Directors Adrian Merz, Samuel Wicki Art Director Leandro Disler Digital Director Calvin Kröhne Chief Consultant Andrea Bison Consultant Marie Vuilleumier Head of Strategy Gordon Nemitz
Production Team
Director Ateo GmbH Sebastian Tobler Game Developer Xavier Heimgartner Software Developer Stefan Laubenberger Designer Melissa Derrer Game Designer Aaron Abt
Date
December 2019 - January 2020
Background
The Swiss holiday airline Edelweiss had opened up a new direct route to Buenos Aires.
The task was to raise awareness of this in an engaging way to a young and mobile-savvy target group in Switzerland.
Idea
Seeing a plane in the sky is a sure trigger for wanderlust.
This insight led to a strategy that turned every Edelweiss plane in the sky bound for Buenos Aires into a catchable medium.
Sophisticated real time flight data became an AR mobile game called “Catch a Flight to Buenos Aires”. Participants were invited to use their smartphones to seek and catch Edelweiss planes in the sky in order to win flights for two to go there.
Regardless of weather, time or location of the user, the Catch a Flight app accessed international aviation authority data in real time and synchronised them via GPS with the user’s location.
An aircraft could be ‘caught’ simply by tapping a finger onto the aircraft information tag. A countdown function and push notifications prompted players to go hunting for the next catchable Edelweiss plane.
Winners received their e-ticket directly into their mobile wallet. In addition, an integrated travel blog provided tips on Buenos Aires. Non-winners could book via the booking platform integrated in the app.
Results
The app got to No. 3 among all Swiss entertainment apps within only 24 hours.
The intense concentration of the active app users resulted in an average of 2.2 hours of brand engagement per app user during the 33-day campaign period. The number of visitors to the Edelweiss website (flyedelweiss.com) increased by 400%. And by integrating the booking platform into the augmented reality game, 24% more flights to Buenos Aires were booked.
Our Thoughts
This is such a clever way of advertising all the airline’s other routes and the frequency of their flights while apparently just promoting the Buenos Aires service.
BA created a poster that reacted in realtime to flights over central London and there are several apps that allow you to identify every plane in the air above you at any one time but to my knowledge no-one has gamified them. And that is what makes this idea work for me. It’s not just that free flights are up for grabs but that it’s a laugh trying to win them.