How Air France Took its Users on a World-Tour Through their Computer, Mobile and Tablet Screens

Remember that time when you could see the entire world on your desktops and travel around it too being in your seat through the Google Street Map view. Air France partnered with Google and has taken a leap further in this direction and launched a digital adventure called “Traveling around the world” where you could be in New York staring up at the Empire state Building, at Westminster street looking up the time at Big-Ben or staring down the view from Eiffel tower.

Objective

Brand awareness is always an objective that companies around the world share in common. Air-France being no exception! It is the execution and the ‘connect’ built that showcases the strength of the campaigns and that’s exactly what Air France did. Brand awareness at one end, Air France devised a way that went deeper than brand awareness.

What’s that you ask?

Air France’s way of generating brand recall by creating a site that takes you to destinations - All 157 of them. All between which Air France’s flights operate! Novel idea ha?

It not only creates brand awareness but educates you about the deeper intricacies of the brand which a user would otherwise know only while travelling or specifically researching the airline, a rare instance or by playing the globetrotting game below.

Execution

The execution phase is literally explaining the game to you and stating how this is relevant to what the brand wants you to know about itself, something that not many brands do. But to narrow it down here’s a step by step instruction set to what you’re about to see.

Step I: Login through Facebook or Twitter or Sign up to start your adventure around the world

Step II: Start off by answering a few questions about your hometown.

Step III: Follow it up by answering a few other questions about your continent

Step IV: Move to the closest continent and pick any place where Air France would travel to on the map and unlock the questions there too.

Step V: Continue the same till you finish 5 continents and earn the true voyager badge.

You are now eligible for the lucky draw for the trip to France.

Step VI: Play more and unlock all 157 destinations and come closer to winning the special prize of a trip to France.

Graphically here’s how it all looks.

On starting your adventure you are welcomed with the screen below and sound tracks representing different destinations on a changing the screen every 5 seconds. Don’t forget to turn up the volume!

Logging in with Facebook or Twitter

The app auto locates your location once you have logged in and has you start off the journey by asking you to select any question of the place where you belong to. The questions are all from the following categories.

• A Location based question
• A locate the place and send as a Postcard to your friends
• Trivia Question about the place in contention
• A Math puzzle

A map that looks something like this will ask you which question you would like to attempt

On successfully answering it here’s what the end of the first obstacle/challenge looks like.

If you choose to stick around for a bit a pop up telling you what you can expect in the next question appears once you hover over the area with the mouse pointer.

On completion of the 1^st continent you are taken to a rather artistic graphical representation of the world map where you can choose the closest continent you want to move next to on your voyage.

You can notice how the top right consistently shows you how far you have reached and the bottom right showing you other option like sharing the app on Social Media and a ‘back to the world map’

Here’s a few more specs from other continents on wat the category of questions are and what they look like.

Moving to continent number 3

On unlocking continents the message that you are privy to looks something like this.

And now for Africa..

The last set of questions..

And finally when you know it’s time that your challenge has ended.. you will see yourself here

To go deeper on a world exploration tour you could do the following.

And that’s about how the voyage ends.

There was a lot spoken about the app as well on all platforms (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) with each property directing users to the site which is quite the centre of attraction.

Positives

A lot of hard work has seemingly gone into the app/site and is visible too. It connects to the essence of the brand that these are the core travel destinations that Air France operates to. It also does the same creatively.

The primary positive is how they’ve understood that people would love to move out of the daily conundrum of work and just escape, somewhere, anywhere that liberates them and uses images perfectly to depict this.

The gamified interface of the microsite adds to the users delight as they’re working on the computer screens all day and an outdoor experience from their screens enables Air France’s TG to virtually take a tour of the world. Pretty neat ha?

If food and selfies was a craze, travel wasn’t going to be shunned into the backseat. The Social Media world is full of travel pages, travel lovers and those who are dying for an escape route. Banking on this fact, Air France strategically interacted with users and got them answering questions and trivia about the places they serve. And if the site wasn’t enough Social Media filled out those little gaps well.

So, interactions – check

Brand recall – check

Bags Packed? – We’ll leave that for you to answer ;-)

And another one is the aspect of simplicity in the questions that again make you want to play more and know more in turn.

Not to mention that all of the questions are interactive and make you consistently move around/hover your mouse to see what’s in it.

It has been promoted all across Social Media also heavily.

Scope for Improvement

From the campaign perspective the only thing that could go against the app is the following.

There is the fact that it may go slow for some users with slower internet and if there was a way to take that into consideration the site would be a 10/10, from its current 9.5.

Conclusion

Post playing the app you’re sure to get a feel of the world around you and know a few things more about the world geography too, something you can use when you make a trip to one of these 157 destinations yourself.

And for those who’re still stuck in the grime of work and have this incessant need to escape, the site could be a good way to tease yourself and pump in some inspiration into you to finally get out of that chair, book a flight and fly away to another part of the world.