Traditional airline ticket with a touching twist: ANA’s marketing campaign “SASOU Drama” (誘うドラマ/Invitation Drama) ask you to invite your long-distance lover to get away with you for a trip, by sending him/her a flight ticket printed with your customized, unique invitation message.
The cinematic TV commercials (CM) is pretty touching. Instead of hard selling the ANA airline brand, they use a story to illustrate a scenario where you can project yourself into and hope to take a get away trip. One of the CM goes like this:
Late in the evening, after a long day of work, she finally left her office, walking home quietly and exhausted. She arrived home and entered the dark, empty apartment with a pile of letters on her hand. The sound the keys hitting the table is the only noise that echoed in this cold room, in which nobody is waiting for her. Seemed that the pile of letters were just all bills and advertisements. Are those the only thing left in this world that care to send her mails?
Wait, something’s different. “Your name is in this letter”, one envelope read. Curious what it was, she immediately opened the envelope and pulled out a letter.
“From a person who wants to invite you.”
“Sorry for not being able to meet you for a long time.”
“I would like to bring you to somewhere during the next vacation.”
She paused. The picture of her boyfriend immediately rushed into her mind. They couldn’t meet each other for quite a while due to their own busy job with long hours. She missed him very much.
“I have always been hard working.”
Tears of love and joy escaped from her eyes. She was always on his mind. In the envelope, there was a flight ticket for a vacation trip for two. Couldn’t hold her emotional any longer, she jumped out of the chair and ran to her boyfriend.
Here is another version:
My thoughts
Background music on website to create mood — In both the CM and website, the song 春夏秋冬 by NIKIIE creates an emotional atmosphere. In the campaign website, the piano solo keeps looping in the background while you navigate through the pages.
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- ANA: “Sasou Drama” campaign website
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- Basic instruction of how to join the campaign and win a trip
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- Fill in the form to join the campaign. The key is to right your own invitation message for your special one
Music is a powerful medium to convey emotions, and has long been used in movie, radio, etc. It is ideal for rich web browsing experience. However, background music was not very common nor practical in web design due to technical limitations. It is especially problematic to keep the same music playing while loading different pages in the browser. Some designs, like this ANA campaign site, take a workaround approach by using a big Flash animation to build the whole site. But with modern HTML5 and AJAX, it is possible to achieve the same goal with better cross-browser / backward compatibility and mobile device supports. For instance:
- HTML5 <audio> tag to embed background music.
- AJAX to load and inject different pages without reloading, hence keeping the current page runtime and music to play without interruption.
- Javascript to overload browser’s native Back/Next buttons behavior. It’s not ideal but it gets the job done.
- Javascript to control music transition. For example, when you enter a page that displays important information, the background music would cross-fade from a calm music to a more exciting, upbeat tune.
Use stories to tie your brand with emotions, not specifications — Apple’s ad campaign for FaceTime uses a series of stories and scenarios to illustrate the joy of sharing the moments with video. It doesn’t tell you the technical specification, data plan or screen resolution, nor is video call a new technology, but most people would immediately visualise themselves in these situations, and crave to buy the iPhone 4 as a consequence.
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