Every year thousands of people lose items on KLM flights. To help its customers KLM set up a unique Lost & Found team, that uses all available passenger information – like seat numbers, phone numbers and public social media details – to track down the owners of found items, often while still at the airport.

The challenge: how can we show that KLM goes further than any other airline in servicing its passengers and create significant international awareness of this successful KLM service? KLM’s target was to get this message across (more than just reach!) to at least 1 million people, living in KLM’s key markets.

Since our budget ruled out paid media, the creation of an engaging video that people would like to share and seeding this via KLM-owned media was the only option that offered us the chance to reach this target.

KLM’s Lost & Found team does everything it can to find the owners of found items. So as a PR stunt we decided to give these airport detectives the ultimate assistant: an adorable search dog called Sherlock. The story of Sherlock gave us the opportunity to illustrate how successful the service is in returning passengers’ belongings and show how the team always looks for ways to improve.

We created a video in which we see how the KLM search dog runs around at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol and helps the team reunite passengers with their lost belongings.

Since our budget ruled out paid media, the creation of an engaging online video that people would like to share and seeding this via KLM-owned media was the only option. Because KLM’s Lost & Found team does everything it can to find the owners of found items, we decided to give these airport detectives the ultimate assistant: an adorable search dog called Sherlock. We created an online video in which we see how the KLM search dog runs around at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol and helps the team reunite passengers with their lost belongings. The story of Sherlock gave us the opportunity to illustrate how successful the service is in returning passengers’ belongings and show how the team always looks for ways to improve. After it spread quickly from there, KLM decided to boost reach even more by supporting it with a modest seeding budget.

- Without any promotional budget, the video collected 2 million views within 24 hours

- In total over 22 million views, a reach of over 60 million people and over 1 million people responding to it (620,000 Likes on Facebook)

- An earned media value of over 2.0 million euros.

- The Lost & Found team and Sherlock were, right from the first day, a topic of conversation and featured on countless blogs and TV shows all over the world, including Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Huffington Post, CNN online, the Chinese TV news and the Dutch national TV news.

- The video was one of the 20 most viral ads of 2014 (Adweek)