Branded entertainment is prevalent throughout the United States, with little regulation beyond FTC disclosure guidelines. On the Internet, in films, and pretty much everywhere, brands are constantly finding new ways to integrate themselves into conversations. But in the airline industry, branded content seems to be limited to safety videos. Though these can be incredibly entertaining, it seems like every airline in the U.S. has jumped on the safety video bandwagon. We knew there were opportunities beyond that to tell the Virgin America story.

In 2014, too many people were flying on autopilot — stuck traveling on boring legacy carriers and their old, soul-sucking planes. Virgin America wanted to give a wakeup call, reminding everyone that flying can still be inspiring, modern, and fun. The campaign needed to shine a light on the real difference between those generic airlines and the unique experience offered by Virgin America.

So we created a fake airline, aptly named BLAH, to embody everything that’s wrong with generic carriers. We launched the campaign with a 5-hour and 45-minute recreation of a cross-country flight onboard BLAH, from takeoff to landing. It captured all the reasons why flying most airlines can be so painful, like limited food options, bad inflight entertainment, and annoying flight attendants. The film lived on YouTube as the longest pre-roll video ever and let viewers exit BLAH to go to Virgin America. Throughout the film, we seeded ways to be in touch with BLAH and brought them to life online the way any generic airline would. So the further any viewer wanted to go down the rabbit hole of BLAH, the more they’d see. BLAH had its own website, “live” chat, phone number, social media presence, and even a fax number. We made them all fully functioning, so viewers could discover many new ways to interact with BLAH and play the game with us. Of course, we made the BLAH experiences comically bad, to remind people to stop choosing boring airlines and try Virgin America instead.

BLAH gained somewhat of a cult following. People bragged about watching the entire 5hour and 45minute film, and viewers included time codes of their favorite scenes. One guy posted a video of himself watching the whole film in one sitting. Another fan transcribed 20 minutes of dialogue.

On social media, followers asked for everything BLAH, from peanuts to napkins. And we mailed BLAH material from our inflight magazine, Air Junk, to some of them. Real flight attendants sent us photos for our BLAH Instagram, and one traveler took the BLAH Airlines blanket we sent him onboard a generic airline.

Together with its trailer, the film garnered over one million views—with no paid media. We were reviewed alongside studio films and compared to Warhol, Buñuel, Lynch, and Dalí. The campaign was spotlighted across news outlets such as CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX, generating 138 million earned media impressions. The campaign resulted in a 621% increase in Virgin America conversations. And despite people’s short attention spans, the average viewing time for our film was over five minutes.

Due to popular demand, Virgin America will be adding the full-length Blah Airlines film to its inflight entertainment program in June 2015. So people traveling on Virgin from Newark to San Francisco will be able to watch the BLAH flight from Newark to San Francisco in real-time

When talking about how Virgin America is different from other airlines, we knew we needed more than an amenities campaign. We wanted to tell a simple story: that too many people in the world—interesting, creative people—are still flying on boring, generic airlines. So we sought out to capture the soullessness of a bad flight. To put a mirror in front of travelers so as to say “You’re not like this. So why are you still flying like this?”

To capture the feeling of being trapped on a bad flight, we wanted to make people feel stuck. Rather than make a 30-second commercial, we created a piece as long as a real flight. BLAH Airlines Flight 101 became a 5hour and 45-minute film capturing the harsh reality of a cross-country flight from Newark to San Francisco onboard a generic carrier.