Casey Neistat is a YouTuber currently with 7.3 million followers. Last September he was flying on Emirates when he was magically upgraded to first class for free. Before reading any more of this post, please watch the video of his flight here. Trust me, it's worth it. I'll wait.
First off way cool, right? Second, the sunglasses thing is a bit creepy. Third, and most relevant to this blog is what a brilliant stroke of digital advertising this is by Emirates. Emirates has a flagship product. It knows its first class is second-to-none. Rather than spend a fortune on celebrity endorsed commercials (oh wait, they did that too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz_qZQbiZuA), they gave this YouTuber a free upgrade which essentially cost them nothing. The odds of the upgrade being totally random are very low. Either Emirates is savvy (and big brother) enough to have a watch list of VIPs to upgrade or more likely the whole thing was staged from the get go. Yet it doesn't matter. No one watching this video really cares. What they do care about is feeling like the average Joe could get that experience. Jennifer Aniston's ad on YouTube only has 6 million views, Casey's has 39 million! Without a big budget production company filming a high priced celebrity, Emirates was able to showcase its brand and flagship product for free all while giving the viewer the feeling that they too could have a piece of the dream. Odds are low that the average YouTuber will ever go out and buy a $22,000 first class ticket on Emirates. However, odds are high that after seeing Casey's video the viewer will have a favorable view of the Emirates brand and perhaps choose to fly them in economy the next time the opportunity presents itself.
I guess the main takeaway here is if you have a great product and you know it, you can do wonders by letting your product speak for itself through digital media.
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