Our strategy positioned Air NZ as the carrier that reconnects this audience with home. Rather than assert this premise via traditional communications, we generated promotional activity that actually demonstrated it by:Sending Kiwis home (250 in total) for free, every weekend, for a month.Enabling ex-pats to reconnect ‘emotionally’, via messages sent from home. A digital billboard displaying messages sent from home became the centrepiece of the campaign. Aside from it's presence in highly trafficked locations in Sydney and Melbourne, the billboard could also be viewed via a live camera on the campaign site.

Over the four week campaign period, there were 128,556 visitors with 19,225 messages sent. From 12,235 competition entrants, 10,017 opted-in to hear from Air New Zealand again – an opt-in rate of 81% that far exceeded expectations.

The numbers may not sound huge, but to put this in perspective, this figure is 5% of the ex-pat Kiwi population living in Australia and it now provides a great platform to build the database further.