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| Alternative media | |
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| Alternative media | |
there's a man' We're at 35,000 feet. He's holding on by his hands. Jun 30, 2009
There's the sun and bright sky and majestic horizon, all right, but right there on the wing is a man who by all appearances is holding on for dear life at 35,000 feet. He’s laying down. He holds tightly to two handles attached to the wing. He has metal crampons on his feet and a white helmet on his head. He’s wearing a climbing harness and a sturdy orange, red and black jacket to guard against the wind. His chin rests near the top of the wing. He looks a little dazed, as though he'd fallen from a mountaintop in the middle of a climb and happened to land on the plane's wing. He didn’t, of course. It's not a man at all but rather a picture cut-out that has been attached to a plane in the fleet of TUIfly, a German airline, as an advertising stunt. There is a tagline underneath the man in black capital letters that reads, “Equipment for extreme conditions,” next to a logo for Vaude, an outdoor equipment manufacturer. “Our ‘climber’ on the wing of a Boeing 737-800 does not only display how far Vaude goes [to protect against the elements], but also reaches the target group on their flight to their climbing holidays, as TUIfly connects four cities in Austria,” says Markus Mayr of Scholz & Friends Group GmbH in Hamburg and Berlin, which executed the campaign for Vaude. “The wings of a Boeing 737-800 become an advertising space. And our ‘wing-climber’ together with impressive clouds and the ground far below, provides an outstanding theme.” The campaign ran late last year, during the holiday travel season. The agency came up with the idea when brainstorming how to convey equipment that can withstand conditions such as freezing temperatures, wind, rain and snow. “When you see it, you can immediately imagine how extreme the conditions up there must be – and how tough Vaude Equipment is,” Mayr says. The stunt thus worked on two levels, because it was also a huge attention-getter. In fact, it was such a hit that Scholz & Friends also turned it into a print ad. It also generated a good amount of buzz at online ad sites, though a couple commenters accused the agency of faking the stunt. Not so, insists Scholz. There are Austrian tourists out there that can prove the ad is legit. “Since the climber on the plane wing high above the clouds is an outstanding picture theme, many passengers took photos and showed them to their friends,” Mayr says.
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