Following campaigns from Visit Iceland that have involved out-of-office emails composed by ponies and Mark Zuckerberg parodies, the country has been on a hot streak in producing interesting and creative tourism campaigns that showcase both the beauty of the country and its quirky humor.
With its new global campaign, “Easy to Stop, Hard to Leave,” Icelandair has continued the trend, telling the cross-country story of the search for a tourist, Oliver Wilson, who is about to miss his flight.
As the national carrier, Icelandair transported 3.7 million passengers to 51 destinations in Europe and North America in 2022 alone.
The short film takes audiences from the departure lounge of the airport to spas, bars and boats as the people of the country aid the search for Oliver, who is in no hurry to catch his flight to Paris.
The aim of the campaign, created by Pablo London and directed by Sam Hibbard through Somesuch, is to promote the airline’s stopover booking option, something it has had in place since the 1960s. This allows passengers to take a break from travel for a couple of days flying between the U.S. and Europe to see the sights of Iceland.
Gísli Brynjólfsson, marketing director at Icelandair, said: “The Icelandair Stopover has always been an essential piece of our business model, and something we hope to grow throughout 2023 and beyond. With this new campaign, we’re excited to offer people a fresh perspective on traveling transatlantic, turning something that ordinarily is quite generic to something truly unforgettable.”
The global campaign, which began to run across Europe in mid-March, will be rolled out in the U.K., Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, U.S. and Canada. While the media plan will vary in each market, it will include TV, social media amplification, YouTube and cinemas.
Dan Watts, executive creative director at Pablo, added: “Icelandair is at the heart of a truly unique and magical country. So, we reframed what in essence is Icelandair’s superpower—Iceland itself—and changed the question from ‘How do you get people to stopover?’ to ‘How do you actually get them to leave?’”