Custom Airline Paint Livery

The importance of branding within the airline industry has never been so relevant. There has been a dramatic rise of custom airline paint liveries, to make a corporate promotional statement or important social message. These bespoke custom schemes can give an airline instant coverage to a world-wide market.

Icelandair – Proponents of Livery Promotion

The Hekla Aurora Plane

One of the airlines we have worked with on numerous video projects is Icelandair. The first livery project was the Hekla Aurora plane. They got a team of artists to paint an entire plane depicting the Northern Lights over an Icelandic winter landscape. This was part of their #MyStopover promotional campaign. This allows customers travelling from Europe to America to stopover in Iceland at no additional cost. They wanted their customers to share, via social media, their experiences of Icelandair and Iceland as a country. To find out more about this amazing video project, please visit Icelandair’s Hekla Aurora blog or visit our Icelandair portfolio post.

The Glacial Plane Project

They followed this up with the “Vatnajokull” plane which is the world’s first glacier plane. Understandably after the success of the Northern Lights project, they used the same team ASAP to paint a glacial scene across the plane’s fuselage. After the Air Livery team had prepped the plane and painted in its base colour, the ASAP team got to work. They painted the most magical paint scheme I have ever seen. The transformation was remarkable. This plane again continued on the previous Northern Lights project by reinforcing their brand values and tying the airlines identity further into their home country of Iceland. The visual impact of the plane as it traversed from country to country was remarkable. This was also tied into the 80^th anniversary of the company.

It was extensively covered in newspapers across the world, like the article in the Telegraph and the Independent. This shows the promotional power that these custom paint job can achieve. Again this was backed up by a comprehensive social media campaign which cleverly engaged potential customers by encouraging them to share the video. It does not stop after the initial campaign, every time it is lands at an airport, 1000’s of people will see the plane’ stunning design. To find out more about this project please visit Icelandair’s blog.

Turn the Tide on Plastic Plane

What about if you have an important message to get out to the world. We worked on a project Mirpuri Foundation with its “Turn the Tide on plastic” campaign. The campaign was run in conjunction with Hi Fly, Volvo Ocean Race and AkzoNobel. This paint scheme was used to highlight the problem of plastic in the sea. This time-lapse video was part of an overarching promotional campaign that utilised many different strategies to get the message across. Using this custom paint job allowed the message to have a visual identity that the promotional strategy could be based around.

Corporate Promotion

Icelandair showed how to produce a promotional strategy that linked their brand values into their country’s natural beauty. What about if you want to send a direct promotional message. Well, this is exactly what Thomas Cook did to launch their new holiday hotel initiative.

This turned the plane from a generic livery scheme to a direct message that is part of the launch event, news stories and then become a flying advert for the life of the livery. This particular project by Airline Time-lapses had two promotional applications. The first was the time-lapse video that was used as a promotional video for public consumption. The second was used as a internal promotional tool to promote and inform key stakeholders of the initiative, its key messages and the importance to the company.

To find out more please visit Thomas Cook’s “Cook Club” main page.

The Benefits of the Custom Livery Paint Schemes

• Conveys important message quickly
• Near instant worldwide coverage
• Increases brand recognition
• Can be used as part of an interlinked worldwide promotional campaign
• Allows social media users to share easily, increasing the spread of the message.

Final Thoughts

Whilst these custom airline paint livery schemes can be expensive, used properly they can be a very powerful promotional tool with a world-wide spread. They can provide a visual cornerstone for the whole promotional campaign. We look forward to working on our next time-lapse video project.

If you would like to see some crazy airline livery designs, please view the following video from Listopedia.