Virgin Atlantic Red Hot
Virgin Atlantic sent out a preview email to all it’s loyalty club members on Friday, inviting them to get an early peek at their new ad, celebrating 25 years, the start of the Still Red Hot campaign. As well as new ads, they’ve got a same going as well. The video is definitely a blast from the past with the reference to the brands that were around them (Our Price, Wimpy) and at least seems to equally glamorise the make and female crew members. They’re not web savvy enough to let you embed the video, although it has already been grabbed and uploaded.
The new campaign site does not offer a lot else, just a re-write of the features and benefits of the various types of travel, presented well I’ll admit, but they’re not rying anything new with their digital offering. As a brand, they’re definitely still in the broadcast mode as far as I can see. There’s a Twitter account not touched since Aug 2007. Their Facebook brand page is active, including the latest 25th anniversary offers, but it’s not been treated as a customer service route, only a marketing one, as it asks you to email somewhere else to actually get some service. They’re not looking after their Bebo profile very well and it does not look like they’re on MySpace. My conclusion is that you’ve got various agencies playing in these spaces, but no-one in Virgin looking after them all with a customer contact strategy. If they monitor blogs, wonder if they’ll come along and explain what they do do in the social media space.
Virgin Atlantic (screenshot from site)
Hi Rachel – thanks for your feedback on the advert. All our video based press releases can be embedded by visiting:
http://www.digitalnewsagency.com/
We ask all media including websites to apply so we can monitor who is using the advert.
Our work in Social Spaces, as you can see is in the development stage and we’re certainly not claiming to be the experts – after all we are an airline and stick to transporting millions of passengers across 38 destinations!
However, we’re looking into the opportunities available to us to build closer relationships with our customers and welcome any feedback you may have.
For commercial reasons we don’t publically talk about our plans, but you might want to look at
http://www.travelblather.com/page/2/
for some views on a recent Virgin Atlantic customer forum on social spaces that we held
Allison
Hi Allison, I think I understand your reasoning behind having assets on your site behind a registration wall after launch, even though I disagree with it.
A video like this is designed to get commentary and online buzz. It is guaranteed that it will be up on YouTube extremely quickly and many people will view it on there, so not putting the video up there at the same time as it is released on TV is a wasted opportunity. Putting your own HD version up there will improve the image instead of people watching a low quality version.
Your use of a asset base, with registration, works in the pre-release stage, when you want to offer it to online places, where you give people access to exclusive content. You build up a base of bloggers/online publications that will use your content. But once in general release, get it out there and let anyone with a digital space spread the word.
I love the VJAM idea, superb. I’ll be following that to see what comes out of it. I wish more brands/companies would do stuff like this.
@Allison – there are much better ways to track the use of your media, which are non-obtrusive to those who might want to use it.
Spot-On, Rachel. Nobody’s going to search for any whateveragency.com to find videos about Virgin. They’re going to look, see that it’s not available and check YouTube, just like you said.
If it’s not on youtube, it’s on dailymotion or google video or yahoo or aol or about a hundred other sites at this point where people will post whatever the current buzz is.
It’s definitely a missed opportunity, not having an embedded video on one’s site that includes obvious links & instructions on how other people can link to, embed, bookmark or email the video to others, immediately.
Thanks for your feedback.
Just to clarify that initially ahead of launch we didn’t have full usage rights for the advert to enable the file to be embedded but this is now resolved.
We will bear your suggestions in mind though moving forward!
[...] I wrote about the Virgin Atlantic Red Hot ad, mentioning that it was annoying that there was no embed available for the video. Alison from [...]