For ages the Dutch created Delft blue tiles, depicting typical Dutch scenes together with inspirational words. We revamped this old tradition by asking social network members around the world to convert their profile picture into a Delft blue tile, featuring their face and their personal inspirational words. The most inspirational tiles were selected for a spot on the body of a real plane (that now flies around the globe). Next to a rich campaign site/app, we created a Delft blue animation film to kick-off the campaign, personalised videos that showed the winners how their tile was stuck to the plane and a film about the making of the physical plane. A special press event around the revelation of the plane, including faces of some celebrities (like top model Doutzen Kroes), generated substantial buzz, as did the landing of the plane on various airports around the world.

We started off by seeding a ‘Delft Blue film’ in KLM owned media and third party blogs. In this film we explained the Dutch Delft blue tradition and invited internet users around the world to participate. After the initial pick by the audience, we boosted the reach of social media posts from tile creators via sponsored stories and reached out to online and offline press. We then organised a big press event around the revealing of the tiled plane at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Then we created the 'Making Of KLMs Tiled Plane' film and seeded it. On top of that we created personalised videos for the 4000 winners, showing how their personally created tile was attached to the real KLM plane. Finally we reached out to local press in markets where the tiled plane landed in the first weeks after its take-off.

Hundreds of blogs wrote positively about the Tile and Inspire campaign, as well as magazines and newspapers. Much of this was a result of the press event in which we revealed KLMs tiled plane.

In key markets KLM’s brand preference rose from 14% to 19%.

The 'Making Of KLM's Tiled Plane' film alone collected 750,000+ views on YouTube.

The Delft blue animation film, inviting people to participate in the creation of the tiled plane, reached 500,000+ views on YouTube.

We were able to measure thousands of Facebook posts and Tweets (sentiment 98.8% positive).

'Likes' of KLM’s (global plus local) Facebook pages increased by 120,000+.

On average consumers spent 5:13 minutes on our site.

120,000+ tiles were created.The plane still generates free publicity when it lands in airports around the world.