(Late) Comment on Virgin Atlantic's 25th Anniversary Campaign

There is no point in me discussing the merits of the campaign or whether it is aspirational/historical (but doesn't say anything about the brand today) as all of this has been covered in-depth for months on so many different sites on the net. However, I saw something, which I just felt I had to respond to this as this truly is a fundamental question of understanding marketing/sales/advertising as we are about to enter the second decade of the 21st century.

Earlier today, I just saw an article on Technovia, where they asked one question of the Virgin Atlantic 25th anniversary TV advertising campaign in the UK: why haven't the agency created an official compressed (i.e. high quality video version) for when it's spread online?



Now that's what I call a great, and truly myopic, point of view! The question is not why they haven't created some subset of some type of medium they don't understand. The question is why they haven't done ANYTHING to try and understand other media at all! As a modern advertising agency RKCR ought to have learnt by now that cross-channel effectiveness in media campaigns is REAL - and there is plenty of research to back that up (and there has been for years). Feel free to contact me if you want any data on this... In many ways, I completely understand the question - you have probably seen so many bad video compressions of it on everything from YouTube to anywhere else, but isn't it much more interesting to look at it in a broader perspective and ask whether or not this campaign is effective? Whether it's maximising its potential in relationship to the budget given? Whether it's effective in terms of brand building and direct response? Etc.

At the same time as this campaign broke at the beginning of 2009, the one campaign which had a comparable TV media buy was Comparethemarket with its Comparethemeerkat.com campaign - and the new cult hero of Aleksandr Orlov (see image below right). As this campaign was extended, at a relatively low cost, by creating a fun spoof web site; a Facebook profile and a Twitter profile which is updated - it allows for longer lasting relationships to be established. The Facebook fan page now has more than 255k fans (and more than 5k have been added today alone)!!!

For years, I have been speaking about the need for cross-media integration in my seminars to clients (see a small taster at Slideshare) and I firmly believe that as Marketing Directors get smarter and require to see a higher return on (marketing) investment, they will start to challenge conventional wisdom of p*ssing money down the drain in traditional media. If the campaign had been slanted in such a way that e.g. 35% had been spent on the TV media buy and another 40% (for a total of 75% of the current media budget) had been spent on developing alternative channels and media spend in other channels - the effectiveness would probably have been just as great, if not even better.

As a marketing consultant (and one who has many years of experience on the client side) it is incredibly important for me to stress this point: you really need to challenge the agency on their old fashioned ways of doing things, particularly here in 2009 where we are seeing overall ad spend in traditional channels tumble in pretty much all developed markets. What possessed Virgin Atlantic to follow this strategy? Who is holding the agency accountable? And, perhaps most importantly of all, can we get some numbers to show whether the RO(M)I is there?

At the end of the day, if I look at the 2 campaigns next to each other, Compare the Market have really managed to benefit from all of the cross-media effectiveness they could hope for whereas Virgin's effort seems to be a completely disparate (and ego boosting for whoever signed off on it) brand building exercise, where they will find it very difficult indeed to validate any results coming from the campaign - and there is NO cross-channel integration (to the point where the video wasn't even available on the Virgin Atlantic web site for a long time and don't even know if it is now, but what is the point of checking at this stage?). Both of the campaigns are great examples of traditional broadcast advertising, but only one stands out and shows us the way forward for advertising in the 21st century. For the other, it means a brand owner - and an agency - need to go back to the drawing board and try and figure out what their relevance will be to their clients in the coming years.