Emirates Airline: Discovering destinations

Emirates Airline, the national airline of Dubai and the largest airline in the West Asia, has launched its pre-summer awareness campaign in India. Dubbed “Guess where, and Emirates will fly you there!”, the campaign comprises eight television commercials and 15 print ads, of which four TVCs have already gone on air and seven print ads have been issued. The campaign has been split into two stages, each conveying a distinct message. Stage 1, running in February, will focus on the destinations, and stage 2, which will be rolled out in March, will build on the Emirates experience. The airline, will spend Rs 5 crore on the campaign.

The airline, which operates 184 weekly flights to 10 Indian destinations, has also unveiled an interactive contest for its travellers in India, who have plans to take a vacation abroad this summer. The contest invites participants to identify the name of the city by taking cues of the visual representation in the ads and enter the contest either by SMSing or logging onto emirates.com/fly there to submit their answers.

The contest started earlier this month and will be on till March. Orhan Abbas, vice-president (India and Nepal), Emirates Airline, says, “Emirates will offer 15 free tickets to 15 destinations with the objective of building awareness of the Emirates global network.”

The airline, which ranks amongst the top 10 carriers worldwide in terms of revenue and passenger kilometers, is aggressive on social networking websites such as Facebook. “After a week of running the campaign, we have had 8,000 entrants, which is highly encouraging. With three more weeks to go we are expecting more than 20,000 participants in all,” adds Abbas.

Mudra, the creative agency on the campaign, had a simple brief to work on: Considering that February and March are the months when families in India plan their summer vacation, this is the right time to build awareness of the Emirates network and promote Dubai as a stop-over destination. “Curiosity is what induces people to travel. This campaign provokes that curiosity by giving viewers interesting glimpses of different locations. In doing so it builds on Emirates’ core thought, ‘Keep discovering’,” says Bobby Pawar, chief creative officer, Mudra.