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Alaska Airlines Couch Getaways
Role:
Art Director
Tools:
Illustrator + After Effects + Sketch
The Opportunity
Allow me to set the scene a bit. We’re in the midst of quarantine, the initial shock has faded a bit and now everyone is itching to get out of the house and back into their favorite gathering places. While there seemed to be an uptick in desire to travel, it was still feeling a bit unsafe and a gray area. I was working at Rauxa as an art director and we had just finished working on the more serious and helpful creative around staying safe and taking precautions. (See previous project) It felt like the right time to try and provide a little fun. To provide a little surprise and delight for Alaska Airlines customers or travelers who were stuck on their couch daydreaming about their next trip.
The Process
As with the COVID response project, we primarily wanted to make sure that we weren’t coming off as insensitive. There had to be an understanding that while many individuals wanted to get out and travel, it certainly wasn’t the case for everyone. We had a brainstorming session and ended up landing on the idea of, “Couch Getaways”. A very light-hearted social series that was meant to fill that travel void, even if only very slightly. We highlighted a handful of Alaska Airlines destinations and built mini features on each destination. We wanted to go beyond just saying, “Hey, look, it’s Los Angeles, don’t you wish you could go to Los Angeles?”. We highlighted fun locations, but aimed at making them feel a bit more immersive. For example, when we wanted to talk about an aquarium, we pulled a video from their live feed, dropped it in an Instagram story and promoted having the calming scenes on in the background while you made your sourdough bread or whatever everyone was doing at the time. We had fun question and answers, and introduced a little bit of gamification as well. My role as an art director here, was contributing to the final idea/concept, designing the, “Couch Getaways” logo or emblem, creating several icons, finding and editing the imagery and animating a lot of the icons and clips we used. I worked closely with the copywriter on my team to create the majority of these stories, which we also added to their blog and pinned on their Instagram.
The Result
Ultimately, this series wasn’t meant to drive their audience to quickly book a ticket to that location, but sneakily get them thinking about these places while more importantly coming off almost as a friend simply providing some content to help serve as a distraction or mental break. This felt very on brand for Alaska, feeling like the caring and friendly airline that understood what was going on and was their to support. We released a new location every week for a handful of weeks. It was also one of the first times that we really worked with the in-house social team at Alaska Airlines (who at that point were very bogged down with work and didn’t have a ton of capacity to work on new things like this). Our agency didn’t do too much social media work prior to this, so it also opened a door to that offering and capability. The work continued flowing in afterwards, bringing in a bit more outside of the box projects, which was a good win.