British Airways Issues A Ticket Home For Football To Leverage England World Cup Quarter Final

A timely social media stunt leveraging spiking football interest in the UK saw British Airways issue a post showing a plane ticket issued for a passenger named ‘Football’ for a flight from ‘Moscow’ to ‘Home’.

The ticket’s copy includes a wealth of England football hidden references as well as leveraging the popular ‘Football’s Coming Home’ official 1996 England song from from Baddiel & Skinner and the Lightning Seeds.

These other reference include ‘Gate: South’ (a reference to team manager Gareth Southgate) and ‘Gate Closes: 1966 (the last and only year the team won the tournament), plus ‘Seat: 52H’ (noting the number of years of hurt it has been since 1966) and the ‘Flight Time: 15 July at 1800 Hours (the kick-off time of the Russia 2018 final).

The social stunt, developed with agency Ogilvy UK where the creative team was led by Tom Madden and Morgan Hinds-Shorland.

The agency team came up with the idea on Wednesday, BA was shown the work on Thursday evening and by Friday it had been supplied to the client before rolling out socially on Saturday morning 7.45am.

It's coming home… pic.twitter.com/Qxg8g0HvLe

— British Airways (@British_Airways) July 7, 2018

and Facebook.

As a print ad it also ran in The Times and The Independent on Saturday morning, as well as 20 DOOH sites across the UK.

Comment:

This may be a case if proactive wishful thinking from the airline, but it is certainly clever.

A simple and smart social post: one which generated 19,000 retweets in its first 24 hours.

It demonstrates that drawing creative influence from event related memes isn’t just about imagery, but also about audio.

In this case a song.

The BA boarding pass ad emerged without a specific client brief.

But in reality, a good agency knows that there is always an ongoing brief of sorts.

All brands have an opportunity to be constantly responsive and create socially relevant work.

But few do.

For a brand like BA, which positions itself as part of the national fabric, the World Cup offers a rare opportunity at a time when the country is united (a rare thing these days).

As well as this ambush campaign, another simultaneous BA sports marketing strand running across social media include leveraging Wimbledon through its endorser deal with Kyle Edmund.

As @kyle8edmund's Wimbledon campaign is about to get underway, everyone here at British Airways has a very special message for him. Good luck! pic.twitter.com/iY8S8S6Jh8

— British Airways (@British_Airways) July 3, 2018