Title	THE ARRIVALS
Brand	SAS
Product/Service	SAS
Category	D01. Social Video
Entrant	&CO Copenhagen, DENMARK
Idea Creation	&CO Copenhagen, DENMARK
Media Placement	MINDSHARE Copenhagen, DENMARK
Production	BACON Copenhagen, DENMARK

Name	Company	Position
Rune Petersen	&Co. / NoA	Art Director
Johan Køhler	&Co. / NoA	Copywriter
Jeppe Rønde	Bacon	Director

Background

Situation: SAS is Scandinavia’s leading airline, but the category is increasingly dictated by low-cost entrants like RyanAir, EasyJet and Norwegian. SAS needed to increase willingness-to-pay for the brand to defend the higher ticket-prices. Brief: ‘The Arrivals’ set out to reinforce SAS’ position as a premium airline and exceeded the primary objective: increase willingness-to-pay. The KPI underpinning SAS’ success in a market as saturated and competitive as commercial aviation. Objectives: Audience willingness to pay more for a SAS ticket → Price Premium → Profitable position. The campaign had to connect with frequent travelers in a new way. Without the ability to command a higher price in the market, everything else will become insignificant. SAS’ existence is based on this ability. All SAS marketing and comms efforts had been focused on this since 2014.

Describe the strategy

When we travel, we bring the world our best, and we bring the best of the world back with us. And while SAS moves people physically, every journey also has a mental aspect to it; new experiences and new places spawn new ideas that we take back. So, we document travelers returning home in arrivals. From three special-built towers equipped with spy-glass-windows, three DOP’s filmed for four days. Around 90% of the people were not aware of the hidden cameras. What we see in the film would have happened, whether or not we documented it. The campaign was designed to travel too. With a very confident media strategy, a week before launching the classic part of the campaign with tv, out of home, press, online etcetera, a more than 3-minute film was released solely to social media to enhance the effect of an overall reduced budget on all other media.

Describe the execution

The campaign was launched October 30th 2018 only on social media. An important element to trigger the emotional impact, was to give the long format film time to create conversations and social sharing in the beginning by not using any supporting channels before one week after its social media launch. Then we aired shorter formats of the film and OOH materials closely connected to the territory of the film on TV, digital and in airports. The results of this choice became very visible as our CPM on Facebook was 6,04 dollars across Sweden, Denmark, Norway, United Kingdom and USA and people by engaging in conversations and sharing the film amounted to an unbelievable 74 % organic reach on Facebook alone. The social success enhanced the performance of all other channels.

List the results

With an unbelievable 74 % organic reach on Facebook and more than 1.3 million shares, comments, tags and likes, The Arrivals was seen by more than 37 million people and exceeded all initial KPI’s. After Facebook changed algorithm in 2018, this kind of organic reach is almost impossible without a huge engagement on every single parameter (reactions, shares, tags and comments). The image-effect was measured based on the main drivers motivating a price-premium-category, i.e.: community feeling, joy of travel and reliability. With a total score of 57 %, the hard-to-reach-goal was exceeded by 7 percentage-points. A total campaign liking of 67% exceeded the third KPI by 17 percentage-points and secured the campaign the highest campaign-liking-result ever measured for SAS. Most important, the campaign managed to increase willingness-to-pay for SAS and drove price-premium 47 % across all three markets (Denmark, Norway, Sweden). 12 percentage-points above the extremely ambitious campaign goal.