Heathrow is the world’s busiest airport with millions of flight connections, but has only ever communicated in a functional way - despite having 70 years of emotional connections.

2016 was the year of Heathrow 70 Stories

Stories in the airport, on TV, on social media, in CRM, and outdoor. Even in space.

Famous stories and personal stories. Contextual stories of the past and future stories to come. Stories of adventurous departures and stories of emotional arrivals. Real traveller stories and magical, furry stories.

True integrated campaigns inevitably require longer timelines and longer lists of stakeholders. We were also required to plan the year in advance, filming the Christmas and summer films in one shoot.

Our key objective for 2016 was to build brand relevance. We looked at a mixture of key measures including awareness, engagement and relevance, each of which provides a sense of impact and connection made with our audience.

Our summer 70th campaign saw the largest shift in brand relevance with the measure ‘Heathrow understands what its passengers want’ scoring 58% vs an already ambitious KPI of 50%.

Christmas created the biggest impact on our audience, exceeding all expectations in terms of the reaction gained, achieving 110 million views of our film (880k of which were paid for).

Just as importantly for Heathrow, we showed that it was both possible to communicate all business promotion under one creative umbrella and that it was more effective. For instance we saw CTRs of 25%, 662% higher than the industry average when re-targeting passengers based on previous engagement with the brand.