Alaska Airlines: Paid social
Goal
Optimize and support a TV-first campaign for paid social and digital marketing.
Role
Concepting, copywriting, end-to-end production (planning, on-set, and post-production).
Impact
Launched a Giphy page with over 250MM+ views, generated $2MM+ in earned media value, and stablished a more streamlined and cost-effective production method for capturing supplementary social/digital content during TV shoots.
Fighting misconceptions
In December of 2016, Alaska Airlines merged with Virgin America and faced a messaging problem—customers on the west coast thought Alaska Airlines flew primarily to Alaska. The social campaign I worked on supported TV that was all about showing everyone that Alaska flies to places like Palm Springs, Hawaiʻi, and Costa Rica.
Building a social playbook
I helped identify production efficiencies to build out a playbook of bespoke social content shot on the same location and sets with the same talent as TV. This helped keep the budget small while capturing a large amount of content.
Social provided the perfect canvas for reinforcing the perks of flying Alaska that only a handful of TV spots could speak to. We developed a playbook of GIFs and vertical videos around where Alaska could take you (Palm Springs, Costa Rica, and Hawaii), the perks offered in-flight (movies, texting, snacks, charging your phone), and the overall joy of flying Alaska to your getaway.
Creating modular videos
The playbook included vertical videos without dialogue that could be refreshed with updated messaging throughout the year as paid Instagram story campaigns. No additional production budget necessary!
Bonus Giphy page
Ultimately, we walked away from a 5 day shoot with over 150 unique GIFs that customers could use to express themselves anywhere GIFs can normally be embedded, including being fully integrated into email, Facebook, Slack, Discord, iMessage, and more.
This set us up to successfully launch the first airline on GIPHY:
Over 250MM+ views
Became the #2 most viewed brand page on the platform
Generated $2MM+ in earned media value
Earned 10 placements on GIPHY's 'Trending Now' homepage
Today, the Alaska Airlines official GIPHY page has over 2 billion views and is still actively used by the brand.
