With the majority of travel being on pause for nearly two years, the global pandemic was extremely challenging for the airline industry, causing 64 carriers to shut down permanently. To recover, WestJet’s strategy was simple: Focus on driving sales. But to effectively do so, they also needed to remind people that their flights were some of Canada’s most affordable. On top of this, WestJet’s budget was limited due to economic restraints from the pandemic. With less than a quarter of what they would typically spend on a retail campaign, we needed to come up an idea that would generate organic shares and earned impressions to deliver meaningful results. While investing significantly less than they had before, WestJet’s objectives were to meet or surpass figures generated by sales in the past. In short, the creative needed to work harder than ever to succeed.

We launched WestJet X – a fake space program parodying SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. The cornerstone of the campaign was a cheeky hero video, which positioned WestJet as an affordable alternative to other commercial space travel. The video drove people to a landing page, which revealed WestJet’s Unearth More Sale – big saving on flights to WestJet’s real destinations. Ultimately, we reminded people that they didn’t have to spend millions of dollars to go on the trip of a lifetime – thanks to WestJet, there’s still plenty to explore on earth. The tongue-in-cheek nature of the campaign resonated with cost-conscious Canadians that couldn’t identify with billionaires going to space, but desperately wanted to travel after being cooped up at home during the pandemic.

Our PR strategy was to hijack the existing conversation around space tourism in the media and pop culture. On the heels of the global pandemic, we saw the opportunity to poke fun at the frivolousness and outrageous cost of going to space, knowing that Canadians were cost-conscious, but longed to travel after the pandemic. Our WestJet-X campaign consisted entirely of online assets and relied heavily on a landing page and WestJet’s owned channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok) to post a variety of content, interact with people, and tag relevant parties with custom-tailored content.

We teased the campaign on March 31st, posting a single clip of pretzels floating in zero gravity aboard a WestJet aircraft, urging people to watch for our new destination announcement the following day. On April 1st, we launched our hero video on all of WestJet’s owned channels. It drove people to our landing page where they discovered the Unearth More Sale – providing discounts on WestJet’s real destinations and generating sales.

The retail component of the campaign took place over the course of three days (April 1st – 3rd). We relied on organic shares of the hero video, engaging with people on social, and a small media buy consisting of display ads to sustain traffic.

In the end, our creative reached 1 in 3 Canadians, largely due to organic shares and earned impressions. On average, people spent over five minutes on our landing page, which ultimately led to significant bookings and resulted in an incredible 34,654% ROI.