Living on Airplanes for 30 Days: Experience Marketing

In a rather unique marketing campaign for an airline, Mark Malkoff, comedian, writer and filmmaker, spent 30 full days living on Air Tran flights to get over his fear of flying. In the process, he entered the Guinness Book of World Records for flying 135 flight segments over 38 cities, the maximum number of flights recorded in a month. Air Tran even put his face on a plane.

We’re not sure how much of an increase in sales Air Tran saw thanks to this, but it seems to be in keeping with a slowly growing trend of brands giving people real experiences to talk about, like Lucozade is doing now with the Lucozade Challenges, rather than spending all their marketing budget on more traditional advertising. We recently wrote about Kristina Horner defending her stance as a blogger and YouTuber after she won a Ford Fiesta for 6 months – we like the engagement that these initiatives offer real people, because they produce stories. And stories are always more interesting than generic brand communications.

[Via Zoomdoggle]