SAS is Scandinavia’s leading airline, but the category is increasingly dictated by low-cost entrants like RyanAir, EasyJet and Norwegian. SAS needed to increase willingness-to-pay for the brand to defend the higher ticket-prices.

The primary target audience for SAS is frequent Scandinavian travelers, and the communication platform, ‘We Are Travelers’, was created based on a driver-analysis that pinpointed ‘community feeling’ as one of the main category-drivers to build a price-premium position for SAS.

The objectives of the campaign were to build community feeling and increase willingness to pay.

When we travel, we bring the world our best, and we bring the best of the world back with us. And while SAS moves people physically, every journey also has a mental aspect to it; new experiences and new places spawn new ideas that we take back. Going places takes us places.

To show this, we document travelers returning home in arrivals. From three special-built towers equipped with spy-glass-windows, three DOP’s filmed for four days.

Around 90% of the people were not aware of the hidden cameras. What we see in the film would have happened, whether or not we documented it.

Another part of the idea was to go against the category: Travel advertising is often inspiring destinations, and price-premium positions are businesspeople, luxury and convenience. Arrivals is not a glorified picture; it’s about all the emotions travel invokes. Because who knows these feelings better than frequent travelers?

To prove that travel changes us, “The Arrivals” campaign was designed to travel too.

With a very confident media strategy, a week before launching the classic part of the campaign with tv, out of home, press, online etcetera, a more than 3-minute film was released solely on social media to enhance the effect of an overall reduced budget on all other media.

An extensive study of the primary target group (frequent travelers) was conducted across Scandinavia. It showed that just one yearly journey, makes you 33% more open to new cultures and people, and 38% more likely to create innovation and move society forward. The more you travel, the more traveling makes you consider the important things in life and reflect on your loved ones and the things you have back home.

The findings made us confident, the campaign would resonate with the right people when released as social content.

The campaign was launched October 30th 2018 only on social media. An important element to trigger the emotional impact, was to give the long format film time to create conversations and social sharing in the beginning by not using any supporting channels before one week after its social media launch.

Then we aired shorter formats of the film and OOH materials closely connected to the territory of the film on TV, digital and in airports. This spilled back onto the full film on social media.

The results of this choice became very visible as our CPM on Facebook was 6,04 dollars across Sweden, Denmark, Norway, United Kingdom and USA and people by engaging in conversations and sharing the film amounted to an unbelievable 74 % organic reach on Facebook alone.

The social success enhanced the performance of all other channels.

With an unbelievable 74 % organic reach on Facebook and more than 1.3 million shares, comments, tags and likes, The Arrivals was seen by more than 37 million people and exceeded all initial KPI’s.

After Facebook changed algorithm in 2018, this kind of organic reach is almost impossible without a huge engagement on every single parameter (reactions, shares, tags and comments).

The image-effect was measured based on the main drivers motivating a price-premium-category, i.e.: community feeling, joy of travel and reliability. With a total score of 57 %, the hard-to-reach-goal was exceeded by 7 percentage-points.

A total campaign liking of 67% exceeded the third KPI by 17 percentage-points and secured the campaign the highest campaign-liking-result ever measured for SAS.

Most important, the campaign managed to increase willingness-to-pay for SAS and drove price-premium 47 % across all three markets (Denmark, Norway, Sweden). 12 percentage-points above the extremely ambitious campaign goal.