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Virgin Case Study: How Virgin Atlantic worked with Creativebrief to re-evaluate their image and find the right PR agency

Creativebrief


The brand

Virgin Atlantic, a British airline serving over 30 destinations worldwide, with over 5.3 million passengers in 2017. From their humble beginnings Virgin Atlantic now has a global network and employs thousands of people across the world.
 

Creativebrief played a fundamentally important role in our last three global agency appointments. They firmly understand our brand, our culture and our requirements and use this combined with their in-depth knowledge of the marketplace to focus our search around interesting and relevant agencies

Hamish Rickman, Vice President, Marketing, Virgin Atlantic


The challenge

We had already been working with the global Virgin Atlantic marketing team for three years when they came to us with their global PR requirement. They needed an agency that possessed an international mindset, could align their PR and social and create a clear brand narrative by tying this in with the overarching brand story. Virgin Atlantic needed to re-evaluate the key focus of their image: from fun and sexy, to a more consumer-focussed brand.
 


The Creativebrief process

This was not about another agency simply joining the fray. The PR & social teams had recently merged and the brand already had a strong roster of strategically minded agencies such as adam&eveDDB and PHD. So, the chosen agency needed to possess similarly strong strategic capability, plus the ability to bring real value to the discussion and gel with the newly formed team. 

Because of our strong understanding of the brands culture as well as the PR agency landscape, the newly formed Virgin Atlantic PR & social team were able to rely on us to guide them through the pitch process – which was new to many of them. We provided a shortlist of agencies that they would have not initially considered and helped them understand how some agencies that they may have had preconceptions of, could be a good fit for the team and the brief. We also helped the client to manage the inevitable influx of inbound enquiries, once the news about the pitch made it into the press.
 


The result

Global PR agency Weber Shandwick were appointed after a competitive pitch process. The Virgin Atlantic team felt that they had the best cultural fit and were a modern, agile, professional agency with strong creative ideas. 

The final campaign was the creation of a social phenomenon - ManFran. Over the four weeks leading up to the first flights with the trade mission on board, the story became part of a bigger conversation with national business news discussing the significance of Virgin’s ManFran flights at a time when Britain was debating its future trade arrangements. 

The campaign drove a higher-than-modelled spike in bookings, with zero advertising support. It did more than launch a new flight route: ManFran has become a real cultural and business phenomenon, forever ownable by Virgin Atlantic.
 


To find out more how Creativebrief better connects brands and agencies, please get in touch today.

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