We’re always on the lookout for creative online marketing campaigns from companies here in Asia. But we were somewhat surprised to hear that Air China (HKG:0753) was using Facebook as a promotional tool since the popular social network is blocked in China. But upon taking a closer look, this particular campaign was for Air China in Sweden, where of course Facebook is not blocked at all.
The campaign was orchestrated by Swedish ad agency Rodolfo, who decided to take advantage of local Asian restaurants in Stockholm. Customers were encouraged to check-in [1] at these restaurants for a chance to win plane tickets to Asia. Leaders were tracked on Air China’s Facebook page, and each week during the campaign a winner was awarded, 24 people in total over the course of the campaign. A Rodolfo representative tells us that this promo was a pretty efficient way of creating buzz around the Air China brand:
When presenting this [idea] to our client we emphasized the fact that we were actually getting free advertising space via the restaurants. So instead of buying lots of media, we wanted to create it. And so we did. . . We naturally chose facebook because it’s very popular here in Sweden.
You can check out a video overview of the campaign below, which claims that over 15,000 users were ‘engaged’ during the promotion, and over 1.2 million people were ‘reached.’
It’s really impressive to see Air China take advantage of Facebook in this manner. It would be nice if companies could use it domestically, but with Facebook blocked, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
Photo: Air China on Facebook
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Rodolfo tells us via email: “The check-ins worked through Facebook’s own location-based service. So the only thing you did was scan a QR code checking in through Facebook’s own location-based service at the correct places, and you were a part of the campaign.” ↩
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