VIRGIN ATLANTIC

STILL RED HOT

IDEA:

The only way to celebrate being all grown-up is to be just as rock-and-roll as you always were.

In 2008 airlines had their worst year in memory. Volcanic ash filled the skies, all flights were grounded. Profits plummeted, staff were lost, and marketing budgets disappeared. And for Virgin, 2009 threatened to be even worse thanks to a revived British Airways enjoying a gleaming new Heathrow Terminal of its own.

My involvement: As Managing Partner of the agency, senior client lead on the Virgin Group of brands, and with a reputation for ‘being different’ and never seeming to take no for an answer… I was determined to find a way to fight for the brand I adored when there was no budget and no media spend.

I asked the airline’s commercial director Edmund Rose for an afternoon of his time, to teach me the finer details of how the airline business really worked. Within a week of that afternoon I had managed to develop a full plan for how I could make Virgin money, but also revive the internal company spirit, and do something iconic that BA could never beat us at. It was simply to celebrate our birthday, all year from the date of the very first flight. A flight so rock-and-roll it hit front pages and news broadcasts across the planet, whose new owner ran a record label and infamous record store, and which flew from London to New York filled with actual rockstar passengers., including the very rockstar whose single was at No.1 in the charts on both sides of the atlantic on the very day it took off: Holly Johnson and his record-smashing band Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

My hope was to convince my clients that not only were birthdays fun, and going to happen anyway, they were also free. But this wasn’t just any old birthday - the sheer memory of THAT birthday would get us way more love and attention, and coverage, even if all we did was give every single passenger, on every single flight, a special little birthday cake, every day, for the whole year. AT the same cost as the ice cream they would have been given anyway…

From that simple beginning, the idea travelled. The excitement grew and grew. And then suddenly they asked for an ad script. That if we could write a great one, the board would find the money somehow.

We did, they did. And it paid them back £10 for every £1 spent on it.