SAS New Emotional Video Takes the Prize for the Best Travel Ad of 2018

Travel advertising has been going through a bit of a down cycle of late, nothing great has caught our eye for the last few years, as everyone gloms on to the sameness of selling "experiences" as their main marketing hook.

But this new ad from SAS, the Scandinavian airline, certainly pushes all the right emotional buttons, without ever showing anything about the airline, a feat in itself. The new ad “The Arrivals” captures the moment of arrivals at airports, in the case the arrival halls at Kastrup International Airport in Copenhagen. The new ad is part of its new campaign "We Are Travelers" on how travel changes people.

“The Arrivals” campaign imagery and film was created by photographer Peter Funch and Danish filmmaker Jeppe Rønde.  They spend a week working with both actors and real chance encounters at the arrival hall as they waited for the right second to capture that feeling of arriving, the focus of this ad, with the voiceover describing the various emotions and changes we feel as a result of travel and reunion with loved ones after.

The campaign will run in various channels in Scandinavia, US, UK, Germany, France, China and Japan. 

Annelle Nassen, SAS’s VP of Marketing said of the newly launched campaign: “We at SAS, together with our travelers, bring a lot back with us from our journeys. We bring home inspiration and courage, perspective and love. Travel changes us, and when it changes us, we change the world. With our new campaign 'The Arrivals' we want to show that travelers return richer.”

Skift wrote in its Supertraveler Manifesto in 2016: "We, the travel brands, should strive to understand how the experiences that we provide make travelers feel. It’s the human element. Travel is a huge investment in time and money; travelers will forget what we say in our ads, they will forget what we do with our promotions, but they will never forget how we make them feel."

SAS seems to have taken our advice well.