Air New Zealand’s Middle Earth safety film gains lots of coverage

There aren’t all that many assets that an airline can use to raise their profile.

Generally, they just hope that nothing too awful happens and are pretty – let’s face it – risk averse.

So when Air New Zealand struck upon the idea of playing with their safety film – first with their “nothing to hide” body-paint clip, followed by a little number featuring the All Blacks – it seemed to resonate with the media and the comsumers.

This, meanwhile, is their latest effort:

Now I am going to put aside how much this piece of epic film creation might have cost to make while I laud it – and its roughly nine million views – a bit.

From a cursory search, I’ve so far counted this puppy scoring coverage across pretty much every UK national – I spotted The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Independent, Sky, CNN, Wired, Mashable … you name it, they got coverage on it.

The film itself has been shared and reshared across social media ad nauseam.

And the results – as I say, around nine million views to date and still rising fast – suggest that people are being arsed to watch it.

What does it teach us?

A simple lesson: that when you’ve had a belting idea and when you have a fantastic asset, you really go to town and invest in it.

The whole thing, if executed merely for a bit of a laugh, could have been made for peanuts.

But as it is, some brave marketers at ANZ realised that they were onto a belting thing and they’ve sunk a shedload into it.

The point is that the shedload they’ve spent appears to be returning in large style thanks to the sheer quality of the production, the script, the make-up, the characterisation.

Now the days when a seven figure sum for a single campaign idea is signed off in the name of PR are not going to be those I expect to see in the near future.

But perhaps, as this campaign makes its way around the internet and more and more of those sitting on that sort of cash see it and realise the global editorial opportunity that ANZ has created from the spend, they will see too that investment has more than delivered in ROI (particularly when even the inflated production budget for this campaign was likely lower than the media cost might have been across tens of major markets).

So it is, you see, that we in PR need campaigns like this. And we need them to keep working.

It’s only when everyone over there in marketing can see the sort of work that we can pull off when we’ve got a golden asset to exploit that they will work with us to create more of just those assets.

James Gordon-MacIntosh is a managing partner at Hope&Glory PR. He’s now working on a book – Antics Roadshow: an incomplete compendium of stunts, stories and japes. He’s looking for submissions, so if you’ve got work that should be included head here.