Rice cooker as a wedding gift. Socks for Christmas. Gift certificates for birthdays. We all give people this stuff. Despite the fact that 82% of us agree that experiences are more valuable than possessions. Why? Well, for starters, experiences make for expensive gifts. Particularly travel experiences. Embarq is a platform designed by Air Canada to change the way the airline industry sells tickets. It does this by enabling people's friends and family to contribute small amounts of money to fund a flight. Which makes for a way better gift than a tie.

Coordinating with 6 different companies, we spent two years building embarq.ca. As a new product in the Air Canada ecosystem, our developers and engineers had to completely rethink the path to purchase. The result is a site that's inherently social, digitally responsive, and rich in user generated content.

Embarq is a micro social network. Users have profiles, aggregate a timeline of social activity and share their trips with other social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. It's here where people can gift money to help get someone to they place they've always dreamt of going.

The Solution: Reinvent the simple Air Canada gift card by building a dynamic social travel platform that allows people to declare their travel dream and invite their friends and family to collectively help make it a reality.

To launch, we were on the ground with campus ambassadors at 8 Canadian Universities, recruiting Embarq’s first, young beta-users. In the first four weeks there were over 150 profiles, spanning 51 of Air Canada’s 60 destination countries around the world.