I love flying and I’ve flown quite a lot recently, everyone from Etihad to Easyjet. (More Easyjet unfortunately). Domestic and short-haul flights used to be BA every time. It felt homely, good service, reasonable food, not treated like an inconvenient idiot.
So I ought to have liked BA’s recent Big Ad campaign, said to have cost £20m, from BBH who make excellent ads. A return to form, a confident, forward-looking statement of intent?
Instead I saw a sluggish, sycophantic, hollow piece of hubris. It is intended to be nostalgic but it just felt dated. It’s meant to be about customer service, it comes across as almost entirely self-obsessed. It’s meant to build up to a crescendo, to take off (quite literally, see what they did there?) with the lines, ‘Speedbird 1, cleared for take off’ but emotionally it’s about as flat as a muddy field near a runway.
The transcript is helpfully given on YouTube, but comments are disabled. I wonder why? So we can appreciate lines like: “those next young men, travelling further, faster, higher … who skimmed the edge of space, the edge of heaven, the edge of dreams.”
And for some reason the client seems to think that showing lots of aircraft (from different eras) flying together will make viewers' hearts sing, rather than make them think of mid-air collisions.
The main thing for me was how out of touch it felt: with the times, with the idea of service (ironically). It felt to me as if it had been written by BA’s public relations department, rather than one of the most respected and creative (ahem) agencies around.
I can understand why some current and former employees love it. (Strikes notwithstanding). I can imagine that the client is very happy with it. But customers?
You’d think the motto / endline was, To fly. To self-serve.
