Attention is a precious resource, and keeping an audience captive, especially when you don’t have the sexiest product or service to work with, takes some creativity. This post will focus on how to take an ordinarily boring topic (in this case, airplane safety) and create an engaging video that holds attention and generates results.
Air New Zealand Takes Safety to New Creative Heights with “The Hobbit”
In this cross promotion between feature film “The Hobbit” and Air New Zealand, a safety video of epic proportions has resulted, and it serves as our first example of how you can put your own fresh, creative touch on stale content.
Imagine being told you need to make an airline safety video fun while covering the same old FAA mandated topics you’ve heard a hundred times over. For Air New Zealand, they resorted to creativity. By leveraging the entertainment value of “The Hobbit,” Air New Zealand was able to hold their audience’s attention captive for four solid minutes. And with nearly 10 million views on YouTube, the brand exposure’s not too shabby either.
This is where creativity comes into play. How you present information makes all the difference between engagement and boredom. What this video did so well was use an entertaining distraction to passively instruct the audience. By doing this, they make it fun to learn about something you normally tune out.
The More Consistent You Are, the Luckier You Get
Virgin Airlines proves this point over and over with all their work, but let’s focus on their safety video, for now. Virgin upholds the personality of a fun, innovative, and quirky brand. They realized their quasi-psychedelic in-flight experience wasn’t complete without a safety video that exemplified the same personality.
Much like Air New Zealand, Virgin decided to make their safety video a little more interesting. Where they differ is Virgin created a permanent extension of their brand that people experience every time they fly. This is an extension of the strategy behind Virgin Airlines to be unique everywhere its target audience engages with their brand.
Quirky? Yes. Innovative? Definitely. Fun? Yes again. It also hammers home the importance of consistency. Your content is your brand. Wherever you share, post, and interact on behalf of your brand, it’s crucial to be consistent. This creates equity and recognition for your brand. The same can be applied to all content you share across the internet. Do your videos uphold the same standards of craft, layout, and personality as your website, blog, and marketing materials? You can’t be perfect on the internet, but you can be consistent.
Keeping attention isn’t easy, but with a few tips and a lot of practice, you can win the crowd.