Web Banner on iPad Leads To Airline Game
Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
Mix an airline, an ad agency, a newspaper’s iPad app, a web banner, a game and a contest and you have the ingredients of how Air Transat is promoting its ‘More Flights to Europe’.
Air Transat is a budget airline based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, operating scheduled and charter flights. To promote the airline’s services related to a ‘More direct flights to Europe’ campaign in a creative, innovative way, Montreal advertising agency Cossette developed an HTML5 web banner that can be used with the national daily newspaper The Globe and Mail’s iPad application.
Cossette management believes that it’s the first time this type of banner has been developed.
“We are the first advertiser to promote its services using this innovative, new technology,” says Joseph Adamo, vice-president of marketing, Transat Canada. “The game that Cossette has created allows us to present our European destinations in a fun way. You could say we’ve reached our objective!”
Available since June 8 until July 20, the Fly Direct game targets all users of the Toronto daily newspaper’s iPad application. The banner invites users to play Fly Direct. The goal of the game is to ‘Fly’ an Air Transat plane through a maze of clouds as quickly as possible. The faster you get through it, the more entries you get in the contest, so the more chances you have to win a Transat Holidays CA$2,000 travel certificate.
The main thing that really makes this game stand out is the gyroscope function – which is the movement users make with their device. It’s the first time an HTML5 banner has used this phenomenon in an iPad application to activate the functions in a game, without ever having to leave the platform, which in this case is The Globe and Mail.
“It was a very stimulating challenge for our team, who really had to dig deep and explore all the possibilities to come up with this high-quality product,” says Malik Yacoubi, vice-president of mobile marketing at Cossette.
“It’s never easy to pioneer the development of this type of project. We’re lucky to have a lab at Cossette, and a multidisciplinary team that works outside of our daily operations.
“This type of think tank enables us to work on these types of projects – to explore things that have never been done before and as a result, continually give our clients innovative products that are fully adapted to their needs.”
Air Transat is Canada’s leading holiday travel airline. Every year, it carries some 3 million passengers to nearly 60 destinations in 25 countries aboard its fleet of Airbus wide-body jets. The company employs approximately 2,000 people. Air Transat is a business unit of Transat A.T. Inc., an integrated international tour operator with more than 60 destination countries and that distributes products in over 50 countries.
Follow DailyDOOH