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AIR-ASIA

FRIENDSY
A Social media Campaign Review

Submitted by Manoj Sahu-M102/14

Air-Asia
Friendsy

Social media which is a very fascinating medium allows the modern


marketers to create an unprecedented low-cost marketing campaign
which has the potential to go viral at a breakneck speed. The digital
technology empowers the Social Media to become much more powerful
than the traditional Word of mouth. From 1 person, the message does not
only spread to 2 or 3 anymore, but it spreads to hundreds of thousands of
users on the Facebook Newsfeed. Talking of social media, Air Asia
Friendsy is one of the best social media campaign to raise awareness of
its fledgling fleet of Airbus A330s. It was straightforward, simple, and
powerful and it took the Social feature of Facebook to the extreme.
Air Asia, a small, previously unknown Malaysian Airline was looking to
launch a new flight from Australia. They were up against fierce
competition but lacked the budget to compete with an effective
advertising campaign. With the objective of raising brand awareness, it
needed a unique Facebook experience with maximum reach. Working
with Australian ad agency Publicis Mojo, Noble Studios created a
Facebook contest that would reach thousands of potential fliers, increase
AirAsias fan base via likes and educate the public about its newest fleet
of Airbus A330s
The second goal was to create a contest that would generate high
engagement and increase Facebook likes on the AirAsia fan page. Publicis
came up with the idea of creating a virtual plane that would allow
entrants to book 302 of their closest friends into the planes seats. As
the user dragged and dropped friends into the seats, a countdown of
remaining first class and cabin seats would display. Once the user fully
booked their plane, they could tag their top 50 friends (a Facebook limit at
the time) to let them know they were entered into the contest. Users
would have the ability to go back into their entry and move friends into
different seats or drag new friends into the plane. In testing, it was clear
not all Facebook users have 300 friends and many of the ones who did
werent going to take the time to assign each friend to a specific seat.
Based on these findings, Noble and Publicis came up with an easy
button allowing users to randomly add 302 friends into the plane.

The most interesting and innovative part was the tagging to allocate
idea gives a perfect excuse and incentives for Facebook users to tag their
friends in a photo. The idea was to tag someone not for the taggers own
goods of winning a chance to have a free flight, but the ones who were
being tagged had the equal chance to go to Kuala Lumpur.

The Facebook page looked like this:

Within two days of going live, the contest had more than 4,000 entries.
The social media campaign grew the AirAsia Facebook fan base by 30
percent, or 22,000 additional likes. The competition received 12,500
entries and reached 2,291,483 people, which is a whopping 20 percent of
all Australians using Facebook. This work was selected as Silver award
winner in the 2013 Facebook Studios contest.
Friendsy campaign in a nut shell:
What were the results?

Doubled the amount of flights


Grew Facebook fan base by 30%
Generated PR worth an estimated $1.5 million
Reached over 2 million people on Facebook.

Why did it work? So what is take away from this?

Massive viral potential


Gives something valuable away for free.
Harnesses the principle of reciprocity
Highly social makes people want to get involved.

At the end one lucky entrant won a flight to Kuala Lumpur filled with his
friends.

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