Flying next to a crying child can feel painful at times. This cringe-worthy experience is stressful for everyone involved — in fact, it ranks as the number two frustration of air travel — but it’s especially stressful for the new mom. According to a recent survey conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of JetBlue, 65% of U.S. adults report understanding parents have no control over whether their baby cried inflight; despite this, 40% of U.S. adults who travel by plane still report being annoyed when being confinded to a space with a crying baby.

In honor of Mother’s Day, JetBlue stood up for moms and their babies. During a cross-country flight, each time a baby cried, all passengers received a 25% discount on future airfare, ultimately landing everyone free roundtrip tickets. For the first time ever, crying babies on a flight was a good thing.

In order to build buzz and excitement, we seeded the video within contextually relevant content on mom-focused sites and optimized in real time for increased shares six days before Mother’s Day.

We tapped popular parenting sites to incorporate #FlyBabies into social conversations and leveraged “everyday” mom micro influencers to share our video with their own personal stories of flying with children.

Additional exposure was garnered through high-impact digital billboards with a high share of voice in our key markets of Boston, Fort Lauderdale, New York, Orlando and Long Beach. Incremental video views and sharing were driven through promoted video placements on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, targeting parents and JetBlue fans.

#Flybabies captured mass media attention, earning over 2,000 traditional PR placements, trending status on both Facebook and YouTube, 147 MM earned social impressions, and coverage on both GOOD MORNING AMERICA and SUNDAY TODAY. The powerful video broke all internal benchmarks, delivering 5.5MM video views, 10K Facebook Likes, 41.1K social shares, and a 79% completion rate on YouTube. Additionally, we surpassed our KPI goals, driving a Cost per Engagement 11 times more efficient than projected, and Cost per View 3.5 times more efficient than projected.

The effect on purchase consideration of JetBlue was overwhelmingly positive, driving 80% of consumers to consider JetBlue.

Since 2000, JetBlue’s brand mission has been to bring humanity back to air travel. Legacy carriers have attempted to encroach on our turf with expensive ad campaigns voiced by charismatic, celebrity pipes. As a challenger brand, we needed to raise the bar on how we bring humanity back to our customers.

Through a special JetBlue flight, we did the impossible and turned crying babies into a good thing, and spread that message to the masses to make all fliers feel welcome.

With the hope of inspiring fliers to smile the next time they experienced a crying baby, we activated a three-pronged approach to release a video documenting the challenges and stress of traveling with babies.

Across paid, owned and earned channels our goals were to:

1) Integrate with trusted sources to reach parents;

2) Capture attention of potential JetBlue fliers by leveraging social posts and video; and

3) Lean into Mother’s Day to maximize consumer relevancy and press attention.

This year, our charge was simple: up the game in demonstrating how committed JetBlue is to providing a one-of-a-kind flying experience, attainable for all, even…crying babies. There’s little we can do about the fact that babies occasionally cry, so why not talk about it in the open? No one wants a baby sitting next to them on a six-hour flight (even your own). And yes, moms DO see your eye-rolls and look-aways when they are boarding with their little ones. So we created a game where you wanted the babies to cry. This Mother’s Day, JetBlue encouraged crying babies; in fact, every time a baby cried, everyone earned credit toward their next flight, until the flight was free. In the end, all passengers were applauding babies to cry, and will now think twice before giving mom and baby an eye-roll.