Sky-High Innovation: A Deep Dive into British Airways’ Groundbreaking Billboard Campaign

British Airways History:

According to their website, British Airways has gone back as far as 1919. They “launched the world’s first daily international scheduled air service, between London and Paris.” In the 1920’s they also added routes to Africa, the Middle East, and India. Fast Forward to today, they do international flights all over the world and have joint business ventures with other airlines such as Japan Airlines, American Airlines, and more.

British Airways Campaign:

Below is an image of a billboard campaign they did throughout England. The campaign launched in 2022. When the world was getting back together travel was becoming more apparent after the global pandemic. England is known for their rainy weather. There’s a famous quote among soccer fans about its weather too. “A rainy night in Stoke.” This quote often gets meme’d on the internet and I love that British Airways is playing off of this English Stereotype. The Campaign was only used throughout England. Essentially what it does is give people a reason to leave England. It wasn’t just used for the weather though, although that was the most entertaining billboard for me. There are a total of over 500 reasons to travel. British Airways mainly used traditional forms of advertising for this. Although I did see some nontraditional forms of advertising such as social media posts, the main form of advertising was traditional. They used these on billboards throughout the country.

My Opinion:

I personally love this campaign. I rarely can look at an advertising campaign and think I genuinely enjoyed this. As someone who travels a lot, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the reasons to travel. The firstthing I loved about the campaign was that all of these reasons were relatable. There’s not a single reason from the images above that did not apply to me. I have traveled for every single reason listed. The secondreason I think this campaign is amazing is that it was only placed within England. Had they placed it in the United States, for example, they would need to provide reasons to fly to England. That is a much smaller market than people in England who want to travel out of the country for vacation. Also, using traditional advertising was extremely smart because they wanted a mass amount of people to see it. It did not need to be highly tailored to a specific audience. There is a reason to travel for every single person. The final reason why I love this ad is because it is genuinely so simple. This looks like it could take a graphic designer no more than a few minutes to make for each reason listed above. When an advertisement is simple, engaging, and effective, that’s when you know you’ve hit a home run.

Conclusion:

Although I could not find any data about how effective the campaign was in terms of numbers, I love this campaign. There are over 500 reasons to travel that British Airways created. As someone who travels a lot, This campaign made me want to travel with British Airways. Overall, the campaign was relatable, engaging, and very well-placed, they chose a great medium, and it was extremely simple.