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American Airlines in flight WiFi
On a roughly 6 hour flight from Miami to San Francisco while returning from the ANA Multicultural Marketing Conference, there was plenty of time to read, contemplate life or pretty much do whatever you feel like, as long as it can happen in a small space. For this flight, one of the many publications that I had available was a recent edition of BtoB Magazine, and on the front page was the article “Airlines’ campaigns take flight amid turbulence“, citing examples of new advertising campaigns from the likes of American Airlines, Jet Blue and British Airways in an effort to better position their brands and attract both leisure and business travelers. One example is “After School” by American Airlines that shows how you can stay connected while in the air, due to an increasing number of Wi-Fi enabled planes (my particular American Airlines flight was not Wi-Fi enabled, however all else went smoothly).
The odd thing was that I was actually coming back from one of the principal multicultural marketing events of the year and realized that I didn’t hear mention of nor meet anyone from the airline industry at the event. Admittedly, 700+ people were there, so I didn’t meet everyone, but the commitment to multicultural marketing has been less than obvious for many of the brands. Everyone from Wal-Mart to Ford to Miller Coors realize the potential of this market, yet many airlines are spending less than 1% of their ad budgets to reach these markets. I was even surprised to find Southwest Airlines being part of that group, according to a recent AHAA (Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies) Study that categorized such marketers as Southwest Airlines, Hasbro, FedEx and others as “in denial.”
In particular, reaching out to the Hispanic market has helped companies such as Wal-Mart to weather the economic storm, and those companies who have been committed to reaching out have reaped the benefits. For an industry that has been hard hit by everything from decreased demand to high fuel costs, it is definitely time to start reaching out to the multicultural markets.
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