SNICKERS AIR – THE WORLD’S FIRST HUNGER-FREE AIRLINE

The regular outpouring of anger at Chinese airports during the New Year period is made worse by the overpriced food concessions and boring home-made snacks that fuel most trips.

So we partnered with one of China’s biggest domestic carriers, China Eastern Airlines, to create a hunger-free flight.

Our larger-than-life ambient message rebranded a Boeing 737 plane for the 40-day holiday period, with Snickers integrated into every aspect of the journey, from boarding passes to the in-flight entertainment.

We made this ambient experience available to a select few with only 170 flights across Chinese New Year.

It would act as the centre piece of our message, reaching those taking a less luxurious route, providing entertainment for their Chinese New Year journeys as well as reminding them never to travel hungry. The message would reach them via the most visited websites, apps and cities.

A press conference launched the partnership of Snickers and China Eastern Airlines on January 15th 2018, taking the message to China’s 500m New Year travellers via video seeded out across Weibo, express targeted ads, all PR platforms including China News Weekly, and Ctrip, China’s biggest travel booking site. Anyone who watched on this platform could win the chance to fly Snickers Air.

We took the message beyond China Eastern Airlines’ 61m passengers – where we rebranded check ins and VIP lounges – using data to reach anyone who travelled by air in 2017 or had booked tickets via Tencent to travel in 2018. Tencent data also allowed us to reach railway travellers and there were also messages on top travel apps 12306 and Ctrip.

We also targeted city dwellers in the capital Beijing, one of China’s biggest New Year migration cities with billions of special packs at retail.

WE OWNED THE JOURNEY HOME AND BACK AGAIN

We hit 5.5bn media impressions. PR impressions reached 3.2 billion.

Our video was watched 35m times, for a fraction of the industry benchmark cost per view.

We boosted social buzz for Snickers by 320%.

And drove net sales value up by more than 60%, a record New Year performance for the brand.

Value share rose by 1.9 points on the previous New Year.

We owned China’s journey home this New Year by making sure that no one travelled hungry.