Situation

Fewer than 1% of Virgin Australia passengers prefer the middle seat. As a brand on a mission to make flying more uplifting, we wanted to make one of the least enjoyable parts of flying, wonderful.

Brief

Airlines constantly talk about elevating the flying experience, but few deliver. Our brief was to bring credibility to our mission of making flying a more uplifting experience. To achieve this, we turned Virgin Australia’s middle seats into lottery tickets.

By directly targeting passengers stuck in the middle, The Middle Seat Lottery provoked engagement and enrollment in Velocity Frequent Flyer (Virgin Australia’s member program) with the incentive of unique and wonderful prizes.

Objectives

Increase app downloads

Increase Velocity FF member joins

Create mass awareness of the improvement of our entire offering via the in-plane activation

Increase positive sentiment about an unavoidable part of our flying

experience

Create a unique experience in the category

In 2022, Virgin Australia launched a new brand platform - Bring on Wonderful - with the intent to make flying a more uplifting, wonderful experience. To prove that it was more than words, we ran directly at one of the most universally understood pain points in flight - the middle seat - and tried to make it uplifting.

The Middle Seat Lottery is a first-of-its-kind innovation aimed at making every seat on our planes wonderful - even the ones in the middle.

It turned every middle seat on every Virgin Australia plane into a lottery ticket, with a chance to win unique prizes. Suddenly the middle seat was not just being jammed between two people, but an exciting game, played on a national level - finally giving people a reason to enjoy it, and changing the perception of the middle seat experience forever.

Insight

Fewer than 1% of passengers choose the much-maligned, seemingly unavoidable middle seat. Changing the middle seat would be a simple way to deliver on Virgin Australia’s ambition to make flying more uplifting.

Key message

Transforming the even worst seat onto the plane into something more wonderful.

Target audience

Leisure and business flyers motivated not by price but by experiences. However they had become both complacent and disillusioned with the static flying experience - it was clear that a little change would go a long way in the sky.

Creation and distribution of assets

The Middle Seat Lottery required changes to be made to the Virgin

Australia app to enable lottery entries and to facilitate membership

program sign-ups. These changes were supported by a live event on

breakfast television, as well as campaign collateral for OOH, TV, Online and

on-board touch points distributed to press outlets globally sparking instant

conversation.

Airlines are perhaps the most operationally complex environments within which to develop, and then implement, genuine experience change. We worked closely with VA’s digital, app, operations, front line, airport, onboard, legal and regulatory teams for 8 months to co-create a digital, operational, fulfilment and communications system to bring the initiative to life. This enabled rollout across VA’s entire fleet of aircraft. Every middle seat passenger on every domestic flight was engaged in the initiative onboard via audio announcements and seats back comms, with all eligible to enter through an automated, customised experience in-app.

Timeline &Placement: confidential section

Scale

Largest scale experience initiative rollout ever undertaken at Virgin Australia. Experience is active, available and communicated on every domestic Virgin Australia flight across their fleet.

Significant investment in app innovation enabled this mechanic - which can be reutilised for future in-app experiences.

Over $230,000 in prizes available to Middle Seat Lottery winners.

Tier 1 - Media Outputs

2.8 billion earned media reach, with 14.8MM reach within Australia alone.

$22,537,154 earned media value

Coverage in 43 countries across TV, radio, print, online.

73.7% of Australians reached through earned media alone

In Australia alone, 721 mentions on TV in the first 3 days of launch

High quality high profile coverage news, industry and travel publications, youth publications and live comedy entertainment programs:

Globally: Forbes, CNN, NPR, Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show.

Locally: 10 News, 9 News, Sunrise, Today, Daily Telegraph (print) and more.

Coverage included in-depth explanation of the premise, mechanic and details of the initiative including prizing

Tier 2 - Target Audience Outcomes

33% awareness of Middle Seat Lottery within VA customers within first 4 weeks of launch

100,000 entries in first 2 months

184 articles were shared 11K+ times on social

Increase in positive social sentiment largely driven by Middle Seat Lottery