Flying Finns score a YouTube hit

There is a long and glorious history of airlines getting their staff to do odd things on-board in order to create YouTube “sensations”.

FinnAir has now followed this well-trodden path with a lot of Scandiwegians putting on a Bollywood show at 30,000 feet: 

Now I have always been one for new ideas and creating things that are truly one-off  and ownable, but what this shows is that, sometimes, a new riff on the tried-and-tested mechanic can pay dividends from a coverage and a viral point-of-view. Other airlines have previously made wacky videos for publicity; Air New Zealand stripped their crew and then body-painted them to get people clicking and Cebu Pacific managed to cause a stir – amid allegations of sexism – when they had their female air crew dancing their safety instructions. Their response was to record the same thing with a bunch of chaps.

The thing that really got me about this story was the way that it’s been sold.

Like other YouTube 'sensations' before it, this video has been hugely popular - it's racked up over two million views.

A great deployment of the “this is already massive, look, you need to write about it” trick. As ever, the media has fallen for this one in their droves: showing once again that no one loves a “phenomenon” more than a great British tabloid.

James Gordon-MacIntosh is a managing partner at Hope&Glory PR and from time-to-time pens Spinning Around, a blog that he describes as “thinking out loud”