Best Travel Ads This Week: Magical Ads From Unexpected Brands

A great piece of content holds the potential to shift someone’s perception of a brand and this week’s roundup features a number of videos with surprisingly great deliveries.

S7 Airlines

Siberian airline S7 asked 20 children, “If you could go to any place that you can imagine, what would this place look like?” Their answers including space ships, very large sandpits and bogeyman. The video then shows the equivalent of these places right here on Earth, all places that S7 flies to itself. A surprisingly magical ad.

Enjoy Illinois

Enjoy Illinois takes a surprising emotional approach to its latest ad campaign, positioning Illinois as the backdrop to life’s greatest journeys. In a way, it makes a stronger argument for Illinois as a great place to live rather than visit.

Airbnb

Up until now Airbnb’s videos have been about raising awareness of the platform as whole. This video, however, promotes a single property on top of the Norwegian ski jump Holmenkollen, which is available for a limited time. By drawing attention to a specific listing, Airbnb is both showing its maturity as a platform and validating its offering to potential customers.

St. Regis Hotels & Resorts

St. Regis Hotels & Resorts tries its hand at long-form video content with a “Postcard from Istanbul,” which was directed by American filmmaker John Malkovich. The video was inspired by Malkovich’s travels around the city and draws on Turkish culture by integrating a soundtrack from a Turkish jazz musician and the Turkish poem “I am Listening to Istanbul.” Although there was a short trailer produced for social media, the 8-minute film is evidence of a growing affinity for content as marketing.

See Puerto Rico

Warm weather destinations have taken a special kind of delight in the horrendous winter experienced in the northeast United State. Here, Puerto Rico’s tourist board shows clips of Bostonians literally diving into snow before transitioning to a much more attractive landing — the sea surrounding Puerto Rico.

For all of our SkiftAds of the week, view our archives here.