Last year West Jet had a hit with its Christmas advertisement in which it asked people what they wanted for Christmas and then those presents were waiting on the carousel at their destination. One poor man asked for, and got, a pair of socks.
The ad apparently led to a doubling of visits to WestJet’s website, and bookings were up 77% in December 2013 compared with December 2012.
To top that, this year the company went to the Dominican Republic and filmed locals pushing a button on a sleigh and interacting with Santa. They even brought in fake snow for a snowball fight.
This year Air Canada is fighting back with its own feel-good ad, in which it buys a round for the house at a Canadian ex-pat pub in London, England, a ‘round’ being round-trip tickets to Canada.
It’s the new way of advertising. Make a feel-good ad that hardly even references the advertiser. And Sainsbury’s has done an amazing job with its reenaction of a spontaneous football game between German and British soldiers in the First World War exactly 100 years ago.
It’s hard to grab that kind of attention through a newspaper ad. Perhaps that’s why newspapers are hurting. A Montreal-based company is shutting down its newsprint plants in Ontario and Quebec. And mass resignations at the New Republic after the company announced it planned to become a vertically integrated media company suggests there may be a move afoot to switch to more advertising than reporting at that publication. Here's what the resigning editors had to say.
Good news if you are in advertising perhaps but not if you are a dyed-in–the wool journalist.
If you are the latter, consider the share economy as a new possible profession. According to the New York Times magazine, sites like Airbnb are dominated by people who turn it into a business. In Airbnb’s case that means actually renting numerous apartments and re-renting them at Airbnb prices. According to the Office of the New York State attorney general, almost half of Airbnb’s $1.45 million US revenue in 2010 in the city came from hosts who had at least three listings on the site.
With Uber now valued at $41 billion and growing, perhaps people will start leasing cars, hiring drivers and getting them to pick up fares.
Not exactly fulfilling the philosophy behind the share economy of sharing what we’re not using.
