Welcome Virgin Australia – Pictures

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Virgin Blue re-branded its domestic and narrow-body international operation (excluding the Polynesian Blue operation that consists of just one aircraft) into Virgin Australia. We have lots of information coming – including video of the Sydney press conference with Richard Branson and John Borghetti. In the meantime, here’s a few photos from today’s event. We’ll upload [...]

Will Virgin Blue re-brand as Virgin Australia?

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This morning, Virgin Blue re-brands as Virgin Australia. As an employee of the airline, it’s been a little frustrating that I haven’t been able to share what little information I understood to be true but, thanks to the investigative blogging of our newest Aussie podcast partner, Will Horton, he’s been able to uncover certain clues [...]

Virgin Blue Unveils its New Look

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New Grbac Uniform This morning at 10am, Virgin Blue officially unveiled its new uniform to the public at Sydney Tower Westfields after the closely guarded secret was maintained by several thousand staff. Despite the airline crew addiction to social media and extroverted behaviour – as well as a company booklet issued to crew full of [...]

Aeroflot’s Nude Cabin Crew Calendar

Mother Russia is often heavily scrutinised for its controversial and sexually orientated marketing tactics… by our prudish western standards anyhow. It’s the point of the creative teams in marketing to constantly push the envelope of a perceived social standard – and it works! Russia’s going through one of those sex-soaked stages of marketing where people [...]

United, Continental. We have the urge… the urge to merge.

In case you’ve been living underground the last few days, United Airlines and Continental Airlines have announced a merger that will make it the worlds’ largest airline, surpassing Delta in size, and creating a single brand that will service 370 destinations in 59 countries. The deal, expected to close by the end of the year, [...]

Branding Braniff International

The brilliant Braniff International (1928-1982) advertising campaign of the late 60′s was a broad strategy employed to re-invent the airline and its struggling brand from inevitable obscurity. The marketing effort was managed by Mary Wells Lawrence who was one of the highest paid advertising executives of her era, and she was considered to be one [...]

Braniff International ‘Air Strip’

Sex sells, right? The Braniff International (1928-1982) ‘Air Strip’ television and print advertising was part of a broader campaign that was used to re-invent the airline – read about it here. In the television commercial, a ‘hostess’ casually takes layers of her Emilio Pucci ‘hostess’ uniform for the duration of the commercial in the form [...]

Ryanair & easyJet Bitchflight

Who doesn’t love an airline bitch-fight? The difference between European airlines and what we generally see in the Asia-Pacific arena is that the Europeans don’t wear gloves. I quite enjoy the competitive banter between Australian airlines – particularly Jetstar and Virgin Blue – who always seems to be up for a friendly cat-flight; much of [...]

The Day United Airlines Twitter was Hijacked

There are a number of risks associated with using third party applications to manage online relationships with customers. We blogged about the risks associated with short URL services a few days ago, but that one topic doesn’t come close to articulating the potential dangers of using multiple social (and other) platforms to manage data and/or [...]

Airlines and Short URL Services – Protect Your Brand

You would probably have be living under a rock if you weren’t familiar with services that truncate long URL’s into shorter, more manageable links. For those of you that don’t know what they are, they take a loooong URL and shorten them down to fewer characters so they can be more easily managed for dissemination [...]

Fat Kevin Smith, Southwest and Twitter

On February 14th, Kevin Smith was boarded onto a Southwest Airlines flight only to be disembarked shortly afterwards because staff felt that that they couldn’t justify carrying somebody of such ample girth on a full flight. Flight attendants claimed his large size would impede on the comfort of other passengers, and they deemed him to [...]

Kulula Airlines: Flying 101

South African LCC Kulula have recently released this new aircraft livery on one of its new 737-800s (registration ZS-ZWP) entitled “Flying 101″. Various sections of the unusually unique lime fuselage are labelled with captions – essentially providing a comic insight into the features of an airliner. The design work was apparently completed in-house by Kulula, [...]

Flying on Christmas Day. What Did Your Airline Do?

What did your airline do for Christmas? If you were a passenger, what did your airline do for you? I was (un?)fortunate enough to be working Christmas night out of Los Angeles bound for Sydney. We had a great cabin crew who all seemed to embrace the Christmas season, so the ambience and mood on [...]

New Qantas Advertising Campaign

The latest installment into Qantas’ ageing “I Still call Australia Home” campaign was launched nationally in Australia during the Bledisloe Cup in August. It has been met with mixed reactions from both marketeers and the audience for which it was intended – since it’s nothing more than a variation on a theme that they’ve been [...]