Air New Zealand were launching the Brisbane to San Francisco route and needed something that actually made people want to get on the plane. So we packed a real family into a large Escalade and sent them through California for two weeks. San Francisco, Mammoth, the desert, Disneyland. The lot. Don't get much better than this.
Travel campaigns can easily become a montage of pretty people in nice places doing nice things. The challenge was to create something that felt like a real family holiday, moving beyond boring aircraft messaging and into what's possible for a fivesome A real family was travelling across California with a crew in tow, which meant working around children, long drive days, weather changes, and the general reality that family travel is rarely as tidy as it looks in the final edit. Snow and desert in the same production is great for the edit. Less relaxing for the schedule.
We treated it as a road-trip story rather than an airline commercial. The strongest route-launch campaigns don't sell the route. They sell the reason to take it. Production followed the family through genuinely varied terrain, capturing real reactions rather than directed moments. Disneyland was the emotional peak. For families, that moment does a lot of heavy lifting without anyone having to say a word.
The campaign supported the route launch across Air New Zealand's social channels and positioned California as an accessible family adventure for Queensland travellers. Exactly what a route launch campaign should do.
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