The airline that thought it was a shoe

30 Jul 2005

It appears Virgin Blue think they’re Nike. No-one else seems to have been able to get away with running advertisements consisting only of a company logo and no “message”.

The advertisement above displays the Virgin Blue logo centered on a plain red background. And that’s all.

They don’t have a brand strong enough to can get away with that! Nike’s ubiquitous tick is one thing — ranked with McDonalds and Coca-cola as the most recognisable brands in the world — but Virgin appear to have forgotten that, at least in the region they’re running these ads, they are only a domestic airline, still with a minority share, and without even having released a frequent flyer plan yet — though that’s apparently coming later this year (the story that announced that was written/funded courtesy of Virgin Blue and Boeing flying a journalist to the conference in Seattle, by the way, so take it with a grain of salt).

Even if we look at Qantas, and their “image” campaigns, there has been nothing so presumptuous as this. They’ve done some fairly ‘abstract’ campaign work, with their (excellent) “Spirit of Australia” commercials, but that’s always achieved a purpose, or conveyed some sort of message about their offering… whereas Virgin’s purpose here seems utterly futile.

In fact, the only thing this ad has going for it is that it makes people like me generate noise, and it costs them less to run it during Adshel’s offpeak season (January–September) than at other times.