British Airways' Unfriendly Skies
Over the years, advertisers have tried all kinds of tactics to attract
customers, and more recently those tactics have seemed to cover the full
spectrum of the possible, including the utterly oblique (Infiniti's first
campaign), the willfully tacky (Mentos), the memorable-for-memorability's-sake
(Outpost.com's flying gerbils and ravenous wolves), and the self-loathing
(Sega's Japanese ads for Dreamcast, which I wrote about here
last week). But in one of its new ads, British Airways, of all companies,
seems to be pioneering a still relatively uncharted strategy: mocking its own
customers, and its most lucrative customers at that.
The ad is set in an elementary-school (or whatever the British call
elementary school) classroom, where the kids are engaged in a furious game of
musical chairs. Its basic premise is that certain kinds of people end up doing
certain kinds of jobs when they grow up, which is certainly an unsurprising
enough premise. And for the first 20 seconds or so of the ad, as different
children find seats in different ways and thereby demonstrate their eventual
fates (as the camera zooms in on the individual kids, their eventual
professions appear on screen), the ad, too, is unsurprising.
Then a boy--with curly hair and glasses, I think, though I've seen the ad
only a couple of times--realizes that he's been frozen out, that all the seats
have been taken and he's lost. His response is to throw a tantrum, and he
stomps around, complaining--presumably at the top of his lungs, though the ad
is silent except for the announcer's voice-over--at this unjust turn of events.
And on-screen appears the word, "CEO."
The camera pans down the occupied seats, to alight upon a fresh-scrubbed
English lass, who stands up and lets the peevish boy sit down, much to his
self-satisfied delight. The ad closes with the girl in the foreground, smiling
at the camera, because she is, of course, the perfect future British Airways
flight attendant.
The "our flight attendants are generous souls who will sacrifice anything
for the pleasure and comfort of their charges" message is not odd here. But the
"CEOs are spoiled children whose main talent consists of yelling and screaming
until they get what they want, even at the cost of others' well-being" is
strange, particularly since all the children in the game who have got seats
appear to have got them by dint of hard work and/or sharp tactics. The CEO has
failed because he's not very good, and succeeds only by crying. The only way
the ad could have painted a less savory picture of corporate chieftains would
have been if the teacher had forced one of the other students to stand up. But
then that would have defeated the whole "flight attendants are angels" part of
the ad.
What's especially interesting about this is that British Airways is in the
midst of a well-publicized slimming down (figurative and literal, since BA is
going to be flying smaller planes) that's designed to make high-end customers a
larger percentage of the airline's business. This ad, with its faintly populist
air, doesn't seem to fit the new strategy all that well. But who knows? Maybe
BA has figured out that what CEOs really want is for someone to see them as
they truly are and then say, "Hey, it's OK." After all, in the end the spoiled
kid does get the chair and a smile from the pretty girl.
