Another pitch we won was for Air New Zealand. We felt the airline industry’s staid, generic advertising needed a bit of a shake up and Air New Zealand were the company to do it. In opposition to Air France’s unrealistic, metaphorical display of air travel, BA’s stuffy, reserved art direction or Virgin’s dated punny headlines, we created ads with a conversational tone of voice, bold, vibrant art direction and their incredibly friendly crew, shot in real planes to show off their fantastic product. This is how the final campaign looked.
Seeing as we wanted to shoot real crew on real planes, we had to wait for the flights to land and the passengers to get off before we could run on, all cameras blazing, and shoot them over three days, during the three hour cleaning session before they take off again. Luckily we had experienced cabin crew photographer, Brian Finke on the job. This is a little film of the ‘making of’.
We then used some of the behind-the-scenes footage as an intro to the expandable banners, illustrating the airline’s honesty to potential customers. Examples can be viewed here.
To launch the campaign we asked Peter Clulow, one of their 747 pilots, to abseil down a 65 foot poster site in Central London and paint the headline on it live. The stunt picked up loads of PR from blogs and London newspapers.