For April Fools' Day 2016, EIA produced a four-minute video to engage our current audience and create awareness of our brand to a new one. The video unveils a new passenger experience program at the airport: EIA Priority Pup. The first few scenes of the video are almost credible; they play on our audience's knowledge of our existing pet therapy program and lead them to believe that this is simply the next step in its progression. The analytics below are accurate at the time of submission creation, not submission or review date.
Our goals with this production were to build our brand in the local, national and international community as an easy-going, down-to-earth airport that cares about the passenger experience. We use soft messaging on our social media channels as a means to attract, engage and retain our audience in preparation for hard messaging, such as route announcements, flight delays, etc.
We contracted our regular film production company, Gruvpix, to shoot and assemble our April Fools video. The majority of the filming took place in a single day, with a few shots needing to be done afterwards. Other than the voiceover actor, all people and animals in the video were EIA employees and their friends. We released the video just after midnight on April 1, 2016, to make sure it would be populating people's feeds when they got up. We boosted a Facebook post of the video (total of $99 CAD), and shared teaser clips to Instagram and Twitter to drive traffic to the video.
We were very pleased with the video's pick-up on social media. Our boosted Facebook post reached over 54,000 people, with almost 1,000 post actions and nearly 2,000 post clicks. The video was included on a number of local news media "best-of" lists for corporate April Fools jokes, such as Global News and CTV. This video is the fifth most-watched video on our YouTube page (active since 2009), has an average view duration of nearly double our page average (2:42 vs 1:27) and is responsible for more than sixteen per cent of our total watch time (16,814 of 102,335 minutes, which comes from over 100 videos).
We made a lot of people smile with this video, and that was really what we wanted to do.
