Why United Airlines' hiring of a CTO was far from a garbage creative idea
United Airlines and 72andSunny have won the Creative Thinking For Good category at The Drum Awards for Creativity. Here is the award-winning case study.
The aviation industry has a carbon emissions problem. Where other airlines and companies are relying on traditional carbon offsets to reach their sustainability goals, United has spoken publicly about the performative and ineffective nature of offsets and the importance of investing in real solutions that tackle emissions at their core. Committed to becoming 100% carbon neutral by 2050, without relying on traditional carbon offsets, United has invested in more sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production than any other airline in the world. A blend of SAF and regular jet fuel currently fuels flights out of L.A., with San Francisco and Amsterdam to follow in 2023. As a leader in the space, United wanted to help promote the benefits of flying with SAF (85% reduction in emissions on a lifecycle basis!) for the entire industry.
How do we communicate that United is investing in garbage for good? Well, there was only ever one person… er… grouch for the gig. So we hired him. Introducing United’s first-ever Chief Trash Officer (CTO): Oscar the Grouch. We gave the news the fanfare that any C-Suite hire of a global airline would naturally deserve, grabbing headlines for SAF in the process. Oscar’s onboarding process provided the perfect backdrop for some sitcom-style films. Through banter between our grouchy CTO and real United employees, we seamlessly communicated the down-and-dirty facts of sustainable aviation fuel in an entertaining way. The combination of Oscar’s inherent grouchiness with United’s good-natured optimism proved the perfect tone to help educate even the biggest skeptics. In the end, it was a campaign that even a grouch could love.
Every airline uses jet fuel to run their business, but no airline will solve its emissions problem on its own. The problem? There isn’t enough supply (yet), and SAF can be 2-4x more expensive than regular jet fuel. Since there’s no greater force in shifting an industry than public demand, we set out to make sustainable aviation fuel something everyone could understand. In order to rally flyers, we needed to capture attention by turning the complex into something as simple as your ABCs. We set out to make content that people would not only watch, but love, shining a spotlight on the kinds of tangible actions that will shape the future of the planet and encourage change at scale.
A teaser campaign launched on March 1, with the big reveal on March 2. A splashy placement on the NASDAQ board in Times Square kicked things off, and the campaign ran in paid media across the New York Times, YouTube, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Twitter, with bespoke content for each platform. Out-of-home ran in key markets from billboards to electric vehicle charging stations. On March 12, a :30 film ran during the Academy Awards (featuring a United Flight Attendant named Oscar… yes, that was on purpose!) in Chicago, Washington D.C., and San Francisco. Starting April 1, a :60 film began appearing on every United plane equipped with seatback entertainment. The work was also featured heavily throughout United’s in-airport displays.
In the first weeks of the campaign, our social content gained over 1.5M organic impressions, 46K engagements, and 16 million paid views. According to social listening tool Infegy, the campaign sentiment was 93% positive. Terrible news for a grouch! Our campaign landing page gave consumers an opportunity to contribute to United’s Sustainable Flight Fund, established for co-investment in companies that will lead to increased SAF Production. In the first month of the campaign, over 15,000 individual consumers contributed. (And some even emailed the Chief Trash officer directly.) United’s CTO grabbed hundreds of headlines, reaching an audience of 644 million. The coverage expanded beyond marketing industry news and into publications like the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Fortune. SAF became part of the public’s vocabulary, and we even saw a series of SAF announcements from our aviation peers in the weeks following our garbage hire.