Situation:

The web, and social media in particular, is overstuffed with travel content. It feels like an exhausting race for the best beach selfie.

Brief:

In 2017, Lufthansa wants to inspire people to travel more. And we want to show that travelling leads to so much more than just some nice pictures.

Objectives:

Our goal is to prove that there are unique places all over this planet that can change you forever. That travelling shapes your personality. It makes you who you are. We do this by combining an awareness campaign with a sustainable lead generating concept.

We follow three protagonists back to the places that have completely turned their lives upside down. Their #LifeChangingPlaces.

We follow up on this by giving everyone the chance to get closer to their own life-changing place: in dialogue with our protagonists.

And, interactively on our campaign hub, where we suggest travel destinations that users would never think of themselves. This approach completely turns around usual campaign targeting in a surprising way. Because we used the users data to show them the complete opposite of their travel habits. And give them the oportunity to win a trip to get there. To get out of their comfort zone.

Accompanied by our hashtag #LifeChangingPlaces, we get people to ask themselves:

How much of who you are, is where you’ve been?

We put the focus on travellers who place importance on quality and are willing to spend more money on it. And simultaneously looking for a life full of novelty and variety.

The approach of our integrated cross-channel campaign was to position the brand as an enabler and relevant actor in the highly completive travel segment.

We decided to inspire to travel more on a much deeper way emotionally. Not by showing how beautiful the world can be, but rather showing what travelling does with everyone of us. It shapes your character. And it even might have a strong impact on your whole life.

TV, online display, editorials, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram posts using the hashtag #LifeChangingPlaces are leading to the website lifechangingplaces.com where the long versions of our stories are available. There we ask every visitor: “How much of who you are, is where you’ve been?” and offer them a tool to find their very own #LifeChangingPlace and win a trip to get there.

After choosing your personal travel preferences, the tool suggests the exact opposite of those. Because only the ones who leave the old are able to discover the new.

Based on the result, we start the user dialogue with personalized e-mails. Accompanied by interactive talks on Facebook and “ask me anything” interviews on Instagram Stories, in which users can ask our protagonists anything about their life changing places in real-time.

The campaign was executed in 3 iterative phases. It started mid September 2017 and ended in Jan 2018.

Our hashtag #LifeChangingPlaces reached far beyond the actual campaign and trended on social media. German newspapers like FAZ and BILD, magazines like GEO or the TV channel DMAX and other media covered our campaign. Chris Burkard, one of our protagonists, was even invited to the famous German talk show ‘Markus Lanz’ where he talked about his #LifeChangingPlace on the Lofoten Islands.

Throughout the whole campaign period we were able to reach over 2.5 Mio. page views, 400,000 visitors and about 3 minutes of average dwell time. We had 1 million interactions and generated 22,000 leads.