We were tasked with creating a centenary campaign that reignited the emotional link to the British Airways brand amongst a broad and varied audience during a time when Britain was more divided than ever before and British Airways was no longer the darling of the nation. We needed to celebrate 100 years by looking forwards and living up to the responsibility of being the nation’s flag carrier thus our objective became using this landmark birthday to bring the country together.

Our ‘Made by Britain’ campaign brought together the best of modern Britain on an iconic flight, BA100, and got them to deliver a love letter to the country. It celebrates everything we love about Britain, with the eclectic mix of Brits on board ( from an Oscar winning actress to a cross dressing artist) representing the qualities we value, in ourselves and others.

The incredible star-studded cast was key to earning attention from a broad target audience; including actors, Gary Oldman, Olivia Colman and Riz Ahmed; athletes Nicola Adams, Anthony Joshua and Ellie Simmonds; musicians David Bowie and Paloma Faith; contemporary artist Grayson Perry; anthropologist Jane Goodall; the first Briton in space, Helen Sharman; and literary icon Winnie the Pooh.

These names were used on iconic boarding passes that were used across social, press and DOOH to drive talkability around BA100.

We were tasked with creating a centenary campaign that reignited the emotional link to British Airways amongst a broad and varied audience. This meant engaging with the oh-so-over-targeted millennials, whilst at the same time having a point-of-view that would resonate British Airways’ older traditional heartland.

British Airways hadn’t done a brand campaign for six and a half years. In that time, the country had changed considerably. Yet in a time when Britain was more divided than ever before we managed to create a campaign that got the nation talking about not only their love for British Airways, but Britain too.

We brought the country together, by creating one iconic flight, flight BA100 and used it to deliver a 90 second love letter to Britain.

This was supported by social films and iconic boarding passes (teasing the names of the incredible passengers) that were used across social, press and DOOH.

One week before the launch on national TV we had a tease phase of social films, national press and DOOH. We teased the iconic flight number and boarding passes that hinted at the incredible passengers on board. The nation was buzzing about flight BA100, about Gary Oldman, Antony Joshua and Olivia Colman. We had 11.1 million impressions before launch.

On February 1st our love letter went live and despite it being the most divided time in British Airways’ 100 year history, a remarkable 90% of cynical Brits reacted positively to the work. ‘Love’ and ‘Britain’ were being used in the same sentence again.

On the night of Olivia Colman’s Oscar win we got 1 million more YouTube views in that one night alone. The PR strategy to utilise the incredible talent to share the film helped to achieve a 111 million TV impact and 54.7 million social impressions at launch.