“Flying It Forward” was the inspiring, endless chain of goodness that celebrated the humanity that was alive and well in JetBlue fliers and crewmembers, and spread that from JetBlue destination to destination, one ticket (and good deed) at a time. Crewmembers nominated the first worthy participant, and then that flier got to choose the next nominated flier, and so on.

The “Flying It Forward” ticket has been inflight since October 2014, touching down in Chicago, New York, Seattle, Port-au-Prince, Boston and Colombia, just to name a few. Each story has a unique way of spreading goodness, and together they form an ongoing chain of goodness that releases humanity into the world.

We shared these stories with the world through the fliers themselves. Our fliers crafted and revealed their own stories through their own social content, which populated our robust web and social experience. The stories were told firsthand via their tweets and Instagrams before, during and after the trip. We deployed the experience across as many outlets as possible, garnering the attention of the press and the public alike.

Paid media’s role was to stoke the flames of “Flying It Forward” by amplifying organic activity, supporting PR efforts, driving video views and encouraging shares of the montage video to boost virality. Working with a modest budget of $155K, we partnered with four strategic, socially focused platforms to catapult “Flying It Forward” into mainstream conversations through creative storytelling.

Partner selection prioritized channel agnostic, native and clutter-free environments to highlight the video and reach our core target and fans. We leveraged ViralGains, a start-up video seeding platform with multiple distribution arms, to supplement our owned and endemic social environments. Video posts on Facebook and Twitter created opportunity for viewing, sharing and hypertargeting our audience using in-line opportunities. For increased scale, we tapped into YouTube’s skippable video, TrueView, driving efficient opt-in views, which helped to increase organic traction.

“Flying It Forward” buoyed positive brand perception amid the negative news of bag fees and earned 56 media placements worth $3.3MM in advertising equivalency , almost 22 times our media budget.

“Flying It Forward” buoyed positive brand perception amid the negative news of bag fees and earned 56 media placements worth $3.3MM in advertising equivalency , almost 22 times our media budget. And 15 percent of people who were aware of the initiative reported booking a ticket with JetBlue as a result of having engaged with “Flying It Forward”, according to the JetBlue Brand Tracker, conducted by Hall & Partners.