2014 Bronze Best Digital Destination

Client British Airways

Team Charlie Wilson - Executive Creative Director, Emma de la Fosse - Executive Creative Director, James Sexton - Copywriter, Matt Williams - Art Director, Jocelyn Deborne - Digital Producer, Dan Phillips - Senior Interactive Producer, Andre Assalino - Interactive Creative Director, Alicia Iveson - Account Director, Jason Cascarina - Creative Partner, John Trainor - Art Director, Andy Davis - Creative Partner

How did the campaign make a difference? Traffic to ba.com is flat in December until the traditional sale starts on the 26th. The campaign managed to drive traffic in the lead-up to the sale and put British Airways on the shopping list for when the sale began.

Social buzz was created by gift-wrapping one of BA’s new A380 aircraft, positioning it as a Christmas present to the airline’s customers. Over 233,000 site visitors unwrapped a piece of the plane to enter into an instant prize draw to win prizes and a trip on the new A380 itself.

Traffic to ba.com soared 272% compared to the previous year’s Christmas campaign, whilst the social campaign drove 55,600 clicks to ba.com and generated £47,500 of revenue – despite no revenue objectives.

The campaign delivered more daily average visits and bookings than all other retail campaigns on ba.com in 2013.

Strategy The ‘Jumbo Christmas Giveaway’ competition ran for 12 days leading to Christmas. Each day visitors could tear off a section of wrapping paper on the virtual A380 for a chance to win from a real-time lucky dip of prizes, plus enter a grand prize draw to win a holiday to Hong Kong on the new A380 that they had just unwrapped.

By offering instant win prizes in the lead up to the sale, BA aimed to make it feel like Christmas had come early and get people in the habit of visiting the ba.com regularly.

Creating sharable content was an important part of the approach. As people won prizes they could share their win (or loss) on social platforms and be rewarded with another go. At the same time we announced what was being won on social media each day to encourage visitors to the site.

These channels also allowed BA to engage with bloggers, influencers, media and frequent flyers.

Creativity BA built a visually spectacular online experience around the giftwrapped Airbus A380 – the world’s largest passenger aircraft.

Bringing the idea to life involved designing and building an interactive website, constructing a gift-wrapped A380 plane and placing it in a photo-realistic hanger environment. Every detail needed to look and feel real. The user experience was consistently replicated across multiple devices, so that even at the tap of a finger the customer could virtually tear the paper away from the plane.

Behind the scenes, a real-time algorithm determined the fair and random selection of the lucky golden ticket winners – allowing BA’s first ever instant-win mechanic.

Even the wrapping paper featured a snowflake pattern made from A380s. All lucky golden ticket winners had their prizes delivered to their door in time for Christmas, wrapped in the same paper as the plane.

Results The campaign outperformed all others on ba.com in 2013.

The Jumbo Giveaway generated 272% more visits than the 2013 Christmas campaign in exactly half the time. It drove 239,006 visits, 42% of them returning – with 32,744 visits on the most successful day. Average visit time was around 90 seconds.

The campaign received 61,927 grand prize draw entries – more than 5000 per day – each of which involved users sharing their personal details with BA.

Engagement rate with the campaign page was very high – 88% of total visitors interacted with the page at least three times and engagement with competitors’ fans was as high as 4.7%.

There were 8,002 mentions on Facebook, 7,980 on Twitter via #unwrapchristmas and 13,000 retweets as part of the competition mechanic – over 1000 free Twitter promotional messages a day.