Getting Quirky

Those Kiwi’s are at it again – the funsters at Air New Zealand are bringing the sparkle and the edge back to their advertising with yet another whacky take on airline advertising and in-flight safety videos.

Hard on the back of the new TV advertisement in which their puppet mascot, the faintly oily and I suspect South American Rico, a rodent of non-specific origin rapping with the ubiquitous Snoop Doggy Dogg which you can see below, once again they have built an advertisement around a really, really thin premise that barely references the brand.

In fact if you deconstruct the ad, it appears to be more an ad for Adidas and the All Blacks, Apple and the music brand Meteor – all of which appear longer on screen than the air New Zealand brand, which gets scant seconds in an airplane in the sky insert as a metaphor for travel.

Not content with this nonsense, the business has gone one better or one quirkier with the 1980′s TV fitness guru and now gay self parody Richard Simmons who does their air safety video which features their CEO in Lycra and the sacked NZ breakfast TV Host Paul Henry in the Fit to Fly Video which you can see here.

Getting the attention of customers and holding it is hard; getting the attention of customers and then getting them to develop a preference for you and your services is harder still and getting them to part with their hard earned cash in a repeatable, measurable and deliberate way is almost impossible.

Getting them to notice you, not understand you and think you are an idiot seems, however, to be pretty easy.

This whole advertising construct is based on a theory proposed by Carl Jung (for more about this click here) which basically states that there a very limited number of ideas that people latch onto when forming ideas.

These archetypes are (basically): the Hero, the magician, the outlaw, the jester, the lover, the everyman, the caregiver, the ruler, the creator, the innocent, the sage and the explorer.

It’s pretty easy to pick the archetypes that financial planning lives in – and frankly most airlines too.

Air New Zealand appears to be going for the Jester. How that’s working for them will become very transparent at profit time and frankly, even though we are lovers of the big idea at burningpants, we are not holding our breath on this one.