747 50th Anniversary
One of my first projects at Boeing was leading the digital campaign for the 747’s 50th anniversary. It was a fun project and huge honor to support such a transformational airplane program that changed how the world traveled.
Our campaign goal was to emphasize the iconic and enduring nature of the 747 and spark conversation around the jet. The campaign was incredibly successful and resulted in an organic social reach of 1 billion globally.
P.S. Did you know that 747s have flown more than 5.9 billion people?
That’s the equivalent of 78 percent of the world’s population!
#WhyILovethe747
We launched a hashtag to use as the anchor of our 50th anniversary digital campaign. We landed on #WhyILoveThe747 because it was original and specific to our company and product and encouraged a response.
During the anniversary month in February 2019, #WhyILoveThe747 appeared on social nearly 13,000 times and, according to our social tool, Talkwalker, resulted in a global reach of 1.1 billion.
The social accounts that used our hashtag included customers, suppliers, employees, flight attendants and pilots, airports, museums, media, and general aviation enthusiasts.
The campaign reached all corners of the world, with top locations being Japan, the USA, UK, Argentina, France, Canada, China, and India.
Website
Our team created an anniversary landing page that featured 747 historical content and served as an entryway to a “stories portal,” where we aggregated social content using our #WhyILoveThe747 hashtag.
In the first three weeks of launching the page, we had over 22,000 visits with an average time spent on site of 6 minutes and an average bounce rate of 18%.
Live StreamS
50th Anniversary Stream
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 747, our team went live from the very first 747 jet, which now lives at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. We took viewers on a tour of the original airplane and interviewed Desi Evans (a Boeing employee who worked on the original jet), Mike Lombardi (Boeing Historian), and the restoration crew chief, Dennis Dhein. Take a look at the script for the live stream here.
Valentine’s Day Stream
As part of the 747 50th anniversary campaign, we went live on Valentine's day from our Everett, WA factory, where our team builds the 747. The 747 plays an important role in helping our customers deliver flowers for the holiday. Our live stream showed the jets in the factory and shared how the 747 plays a role with flower shipments worldwide. We also encouraged live interaction with viewers by dropping rose emojis 🌹 in the comments for anyone who told us why they loved the 747 and used our hashtag #WhyILoveThe747.
We used email to encourage our audience to tune into our live streams and visit our website for interesting historical content about the jet. Our average send was to 110,000+ subscribers and resulted in a 31.2% average open rate and a 4.5% average click-thru rate (CTR).
If I could do these email campaigns differently, I would have tested an email that included one strong call-to-action instead of including so many options to click. I also think we could have sent a follow-up email after the live streams, encouraging our subscribers to rewatch the video. A follow-up email could have resulted in more views on the video streams.