KLM Royal Dutch Airlines asked us to create a campaign that would generate sympathy for the brand and contribute to KLM’s brand purpose ‘Moving your world by creating memorable experiences’. At the same time the campaign needed to highlight KLM’s pioneering spirit.

Target audience: 1) travellers who depart, land or transfer at KLM’s home base Schiphol, 2) people worldwide who fly regularly. Both KLM customers and non-KLM customers.

Since KLM always aims to generate ‘extra bang for the marketing buck’, increasing KLM’s brand awareness by creating a campaign with talk value / PR value, was an additional goal.

*We are not allowed to share budgets.*

What if these travellers could meet to exchange local travel tips?

Introducing KLM Take-off Tips

We built a unique installation. A hologram bar that allows travellers separated by thousands of miles to sit face to face, just as in real life. The bar was designed in two halves. One half located at Amsterdam Airport. The other half at various airports around the world.

Travellers from all over the world took place in one of the first ever build hologram bars: enjoying a drink, sharing a real connection and exchanging culturally relevant and up-to-date local travel tips. Making their waiting period at the airport more relevant and memorable.

We created video footage of the encounters, which we shared on social platforms and with the press.

We needed to tick quite a lot of boxes for the brand: contribute to KLM’s ‘memorable experience’ promise, underline their pioneering spirit, create sympathy for the brand and generate extra bang for the marketing buck.

Based on these demands, we opted for a concept based on two building blocks:

1) connecting people, appealing to emotion, creating sympathy for the brand and making our communication memorable.

2) using extraordinary state-of-the-art technology underlining KLM’s pioneering spirit.

Target audience: 1) travellers who depart, land or transfer at KLM’s home base Schiphol, 2) people worldwide who fly regularly. Both KLM customers and non-KLM customers.

It took us almost three months to develop our Hologram Bars. We needed technology that could record and transmit the complex hologram data in real time. After we connected several computers that could process and transmit this information, we linked them via a private fibre-optic internet connection. The bars recorded every movement in multiple perspectives via a face-tracking device and transmitted this information to the hologram bar on the opposite side of the world. On both sides of this connection, the faces were projected back onto a PepperScrim screen.

The brand activation created a memorable brand experience for the travellers traveling in opposite directions and yielded engaging content for PR purposes and social media. In other words: a brand activation experienced by few but seen (and felt) by many.

KLM aims to truly connect people – so we are currently working on arranging new (permanent) permits for other focus markets.

In addition to reaching out to the press, we created content around travellers who ‘met’ in the bar and shared it via social media. The story was celebrated by worldwide news, tech and travel sites with a reach of a 100 million people. It was picked up massively by the press: for example by PSFK, Daily Mail, Contagious and the Lonely Planet. KLM’s reputation (most customer-centric airline) was raised by +21%, KLM’s brand awareness was raised by 9% (in focus countries: Brazil, Nordics and US) and the online sentiment was 99% positive.