China Airlines: What Travel Brings You
China Airlines sought to deepen its emotional connection with travelers, moving beyond transactional benefits. The client aimed to highlight the profound, personal value of travel to a broad audience, inspiring them to reflect on their journeys.
Creative Idea
It reframed travel's true souvenirs as unseen personal transformations and lasting memories.
China Airlines highlighted that travel brings back more than just souvenirs, but profound, often unnoticed personal transformations and memories, making the journey's impact deeply personal and lasting for every traveler.
The Souvenirs You Never Meant To Bring Home
48 Percent Sales Growth
The campaign’s impact was immediate and massive, driving a 48% growth in sales for China Airlines in 2019. Within just two weeks of launch, the film amassed over 9 million views across platforms, with the Chinese - language YouTube version alone crossing 6 million views in a month. Beyond the metrics, passenger satisfaction scores climbed by up to 1.3 points, as the brand successfully pivoted from a traditional, safety - first image to a bold, experience - oriented identity that resonated with millennial travelers.
Subverting the Airline Cliché
Chief Creative Officer Murphy Chou and Director Ging-Zim Lo intentionally avoided the "smiling flight attendant" tropes of the industry. Instead, they focused on the "messy" reality of travel through a montage of 19 distinct characters. These included a man returning from Hokkaido with a snapped snowboard and a broken leg, a couple discarding a marriage certificate in a Las Vegas airport bin, and a woman returning from Bangkok with a supposedly "haunted" souvenir.
The Stork Chasing Premiere
To launch the campaign, the airline hosted a unique event inviting 60 pregnant women who had conceived during their overseas holidays. Based on registration data, the airline jokingly identified Japan, Italy, and Thailand as the world’s "Best Stork - Chasing Destinations." This focus on "unexpected souvenirs" was a deliberate move by Leo Burnett Taiwan to frame travel as a transformative experience that leaves a permanent mark on life, rather than just a checklist of destinations.
Creative Strategy Deconstructed
Company
China Airlines, as an airline, facilitates journeys that inherently lead to personal growth and lasting memories for its passengers.
Category
Airlines typically promote destinations, comfort, or price, often overlooking the deeper, transformative impact of the travel experience itself.
Customer
Travelers seek more than just destinations; they desire personal growth, unique experiences, and lasting memories, often without fully realizing their profound impact.
Culture
A cultural shift towards valuing experiences and personal growth over material possessions made the message about intangible travel benefits deeply resonate.
Company
China Airlines, as an airline, facilitates journeys that inherently lead to personal growth and lasting memories for its passengers.
Category
Airlines typically promote destinations, comfort, or price, often overlooking the deeper, transformative impact of the travel experience itself.
Strategy:
Reframe travel's value from tangible souvenirs to intangible personal transformation and lasting memories.
Customer
Travelers seek more than just destinations; they desire personal growth, unique experiences, and lasting memories, often without fully realizing their profound impact.
Culture
A cultural shift towards valuing experiences and personal growth over material possessions made the message about intangible travel benefits deeply resonate.
Strategy:
Reframe travel's value from tangible souvenirs to intangible personal transformation and lasting memories.
Strategy Technique
Make the Invisible Visible
The campaign made the intangible, personal growth and lasting memories from travel tangible and relatable. It brought to light the profound, yet often unacknowledged, impact of journeys on individuals.
Explore Technique
Creative Technique
Spotlight the Overlooked
The campaign deliberately shifts focus from obvious travel souvenirs to the subtle, transformative personal changes and memories travelers gain. It highlights the profound, often unnoticed impacts of experiences.
Explore Technique
Craft Breakdown
This campaign exceptionally uses compelling short stories, supported by evocative cinematography and a deeply moving original score, to convey the unpredictable and enriching nature of travel. It artfully transforms disparate experiences into a cohesive narrative about life's journeys.
Each vignette is a miniature, emotionally charged narrative, skillfully conveying complex life events and their connection to travel without explicit exposition, allowing viewers to infer and connect.
The original song's poignant lyrics and gentle melody act as the campaign's emotional backbone, seamlessly weaving through diverse scenarios and unifying the disparate vignettes with a consistent, profound mood.
The camera work consistently captures intimate human moments, employing thoughtful framing, natural lighting, and expressive close-ups to make each character's emotional journey palpable and visually engaging.
The ad's editing masterfully cuts between diverse locations and narratives, maintaining a contemplative pace while subtly building the overarching theme of travel's transformative power.
The true magic of this campaign arises from the synergy between its compelling, vignette-based storytelling and the evocative original music, which together elevate simple scenes into profound reflections on life's journeys.
