Air New Zealand Body Painting Ad – Video Commercial. Air New Zealand flight crew star in this very interesting commercial. They got no clothes on. All they have is body paint. An air crew wearing nothing should be weird and yucky but this actually comes across as, well how should we describe it, kinda classy. You gotta give props to Air New Zealand for pushing the creative boundaries. The company also got in the news recently for its body billboard ads.
Update: Sorry, video disabled at source.
Air New Zealand’s Body Billboard (20 March 2009). CNN reports on an advertisement campaign by Air New Zealand which uses human bodies as billboards for ads. We’re not sure yet what to think of it. On the one hand, we think its very interesting but on the other hand we can’t get over the fact that this normalizes the use of the human body as a commodity. Next thing you know we’ll have company logos stamped on peoples forehead. Do we really want that to happen? We think we’ll go crazy when we ride our daily commuter train and all we see are passengers with ads on their foreheads.
Update: Video disabled at source.
*****
UPDATE: With their body painting commercial and their body billboard ads, its worth noting that the guys behind Air New Zealand are very good in developing positive buzz for their company.
You know who should learn from the ANZ folks? The people running Ireland’s Ryanair! Check out the following blog entries we wrote earlier about Ryanair’s not-so-good public image.
Ryan Air vs. Lunatic Bloggers in the Blogosphere
02 March 2009
Hahaha. After winning our highly prestigious Stupid Idea of the Day award, the folks at budget airline Ryanair are giving us lessons on how NOT to engage the blogosphere, how NOT to respond to customer concerns, how NOT to do public relations work, and how NOT to win friends and influence people.
For their really bad conduct, we are giving the Ryanair staff involved in this controversy our very prestigious Douchebag of the Day award. Here’s a story from the Guardian which would tell you why their award is highly deserved:
Ryanair: “Lunatic bloggers can keep the blogosphere”
Web developer Jason Roe thought he’d discovered a flaw in Ryanair’s website while booking a flight, and blogged about how it seemed that users could book a flight for a charge of ‘0.00’.
Later that afternoon, someone calling themselves ‘Ryanair Staff’ posted the following comment, which we’ve published in all its glory:
“jason! you’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is!
“you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!”
Roe replied:
“I have not lied, I found a bug in your site that allows a user to see a 0.00 price listed beside a flight. Yes, I have cleared a session, but you have not prevented session jumping! I hope to god a Ryanair management type reads this.
“Crappy CMS such as wordpress .. its a blog? I put my mobile phone number online as im a freelance developer. At least I provide a phone number on my website, no premium lines here.”
And got this reply:
“Hehe – I found a bug that lets me show anything I want on your site.
“All I have to do is put something along the lines of javascript:void(document.write(‘hehe’)) into the address bar, and I can do whatever I want with your site ( or indeed any other site ).
“I’m not sure what you think you’ve achieved here – that wouldn’t have gotten you through to the back end. You wouldn’t even have been able to enter passenger information.
“You must never have seen a decent exploit, if you think this is something worth bragging about. There is another exploit you could try – wait until we’re running a promotion when we give away a million odd seats for free anyway.”
That exchange speaks for itself.
Trade blog Travolution picked this up, and said they confirmed that the IP address of ‘Ryanair Staff’ could be traced back to Ryanair headquarters. Later, Ryanair’s official comms team gave Travolution a statement, though I’m not sure which response is more constructive:
“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.
“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”
Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary: Stupid Idea of the Day Award
If we allow Ryan Air’s Michael O’Leary to go ahead with his idea of charging airline passengers for using the toilet, what will stop him for eventually charging passengers for the airplane air they breath? Or for the seats they sit on, or for the floor they walk on, or for their use of emergency oxygen masks?
For considering such a terrible idea of charging toilet use, we are giving our first ever Stupid Idea of the Day award to the Ryanair Chief Executive.
Says Rochelle Turner of Which Holiday who is critical of the idea: “It seems Ryanair is prepared to plumb any depth to make a fast buck and, once again, is putting profit before the comfort of its customers. Charging people to go to the toilet might result in fewer people buying overpriced drinks on board, though – that would serve Ryanair right.”
We are so with Rochelle on this one.