Over the past decade, airlines have spent millions of dollars on safety videos featuring tropical islands and celebrities. Why?
My 55-minute flight from Geneva to Zurich didn't land on its first attempt.
The A220-100, caught in strong winds, trembled side to side as we descended. And instead of lowering its wheels as we approached the runway, the airplane accelerated high into the sky at the last second. My heart pumped.
Thirty minutes later, the pilot tried again. The man to my left prayed. The one to my right braced. The one in front kept snoring.
"Really?" I wondered. This is the flight with my name on it? This 55 minute, Costco sample of a flight?”
This time, it was a success. I had just experienced my first aborted landing. As they say, you never forget your first. I would fist bump the pilot on my way out, and then sprint across the Zurich airport to catch my flight to San Francisco.
But I was forever changed. My experience made me think about safety in a way I hadn’t before: I became someone who pays attention to the airline safety videos.
And what I noticed surprised me. The airlines weren’t just making safety demonstrations. They were making entertainment, engaging in an arms race to make their safety videos bigger, better, and frankly: more ridiculous.
To track this evolution, I analyzed hundreds of airline safety videos spanning thirty years. And then, I took them apart. I dissected their locations, music, and celebrities.
The airline safety video has evolved. But has it made us safer?
“It’s a party, it’s a party, it’s a party…”
The first clue that airline safety videos are drawing more attention lies in one of the most unforgiving corners of the internet: YouTube.
The comments section for British Airways’ 2024 safety video, May We Haveth One’s Attention, is a party.
User marjiscriven9657 loves how “the Scotsmen buckled on their seatbelts while on horses!,” while SomaelTentacleHair confesses that he watched the full video from the comfort of his home.
British Airways crew stand in a classical setting from the May We Haveth One’s Attention safety video. (YouTube/British Airways)
And he’s not the only one. May We Haveth One’s Attention has nearly 2m views. The video was directed by Sharon Maguire (Bridget Jones’s Diary) and the costumes designed by three-time Oscar winning designer Jenny Beavan.
Airline safety videos were never meant to get this much attention, or frankly, end up on IMDB, as this one did.
But in 2007, Virgin America started a “make flying fun again” campaign, and saw the in-flight safety video as an opportunity to communicate its playful brand identity. The video, which features scruffy cartoons, including a tech-obsessed nun, exploded. And since then the entire vibe around the airline safety video has changed.
United’s Safety in Motion, released last year, is another such video. Karim Zariffa, the director, explained that the video took over ten months — a comparable timeframe to the shooting and post-production processes of many Hollywood feature films — and involved more than 1k real dominoes.
“It was a big shoot, we had over 160 people on set,” Zariffa said. “We spent weeks trying every little thing — we had so many different machines that we sketched and pitched, and hundreds of hours of experimentation went into this five-minute video.”
The herculean effort starts to make sense when you consider the eyeballs the video gets from airline passengers. Over the course of a year, the United safety video racks up ~100m views, nearly as many as a Super Bowl commercial. And since many passengers fly for work, they fly often — Zariffa found this to be a great motivator for his crew:
“We can’t have any mistakes or errors because people will find them the 30th time they’ve watched it. Everybody was stressed on the job because crew members were scared to make a mistake and make the whole company look bad.”
People are paying attention. And the stakes are curiously high. But this isn’t just vibes — the data shows us how these videos have changed over time.
The numbers don’t lie
Armed with a Red Bull, a spreadsheet, and no Saturday night plans, I compiled over 113 airline safety videos. Outside of the fact that older videos feature artifacts like iPods and briefcases and newer ones feature vapes and emotional support animals, there were two key evolutions that I noticed.
First, since 2011, more and more videos increasingly take place outside the airplane:
The Hustle
You read that correctly. They take place on beach resorts, basketball courts, tropical islands, and even fancy symphony halls. But not on airplanes.
One reason is that these videos double as tourism ads — if you sell the destination, you sell the ticket. Air New Zealand’s partnership with the Department of Conservation is an example. Such partnerships can also help offset the production costs of videos.
Second, celebrities have started to feature in these videos much more often. There were no celebrities until 2011. And since then, a steady presence each year.
The Hustle
Many actors and athletes show up to advertise new movies and events:
- United partnered with Spiderman when Columbia Pictures’ Far From Home came out.
- Qatar Airways teamed up with Neymar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
- British Airways partnered with Gordon Ramsay in 2017, because, well, he’s bloody brilliant.
One particular airline, though, has gone into overdrive. Air New Zealand has made use of celebrities and exotic locations more than anyone.
The Hustle
But are these viral videos actually worth the price tag?
The million dollar flight briefing
The cost of these videos is estimated to be in the millions — Air New Zealand’s It’s Kiwi Safety, for example, which was released in 2018, is estimated to have cost ~$2.5M. This number includes costs for star talent, music rights, and production.
That’s a lot of money. And in an industry where every dollar matters and layoffs are rampant, it seems irresponsible to spend this much on a video that has its red carpet debut in the aisle of an airplane.
But Gary Porter, a senior principal consultant at P&C Global who’s helped airlines modernize their safety videos, disagrees.
Porter explained that airlines can generate earned media worth millions of dollars from these safety videos. It’s Kiwi Safety, for instance, is estimated to have gotten 20m views across all social media channels.
In Jay-Z’s words, a video like that “gets the people going” — and in MBA lingo, “builds brand loyalty.” And this loyalty, according to Porter, is worth quite a bit.
“We often see a strong lift in Net Promoter Score (NPS) directly attributable to the airline safety video,” he says. “This lift in NPS can be monetized moving forward: When price is equal, passengers will pick the airline they like the most.”
Airlines run marketing experiments to measure the incremental value of making such productions. Some ways to do this, outside of direct passenger surveys, include:
- A/B Tests
- Sentiment analysis of the video across social media platforms
- Aided & unaided recall experiments in comparison to other airlines
Delta is among the airlines that have produced elaborate safety videos. (Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
Since airlines have to produce safety videos anyways, Porter explains that the question they have to ask is “whether the incremental value of producing such a big budget production, as opposed to just a regular safety video, is worth it.” According to Porter, the experiments above usually support the hypothesis that it is.
Shashank Nigam, founder of aviation strategy consultancy Simpliflying, agrees and makes the claim that these buzzy videos are often a more cost effective way to market than traditional forms of advertising — especially for a low cost carrier like Air New Zealand (ranked 40th in the world by revenue).
“They’re not going to rent a billboard outside LAX for 30 days. It’s hard to even track the eyeballs on that and the ROI,” Nigam says. “They have to think guerrilla, they have to think about the most efficient way of marketing. And social media marketing allows them to get immense reach, which they couldn’t afford through traditional means.”
Some airlines, though, aren’t convinced. They don’t see the merit in spending any of their budget on a flashy safety video. Emirates’ latest safety video description reads:
“If you’re expecting dancers, movie stars and singers, we’ve saved that for our in-flight entertainment. We take your safety seriously. So here’s our refreshed, no-nonsense safety video for your next Emirates flight.”
Shots fired. And, perhaps, warranted.
Safety first
UNSW Sydney professor Brett Molesworth, who’s also a pilot — I know, it’s unfair — has spent the last decade researching aviation safety. He co-authored the 2015 paper Pre-flight safety briefings, mood and information retention, which sounded like something I should read. I went one further and called him.
Molesworth’s paper examined whether different styles of safety videos (standard, humorous, and movie-themed) impact retention of key safety messages.
The results were damning: the more entertaining the video, the worse passengers performed in recalling key safety information. And recall of the material was never more than 50%, regardless of video type.
Boring safety videos may be more effective at communicating messages to passengers than celebrity-studded videos. (Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Molesworth, though, wasn’t too surprised.
“What we do know when it comes to information processing: our brain can only take so much information at a particular time,” he says. “So when we overload that information, there's a degradation. And when you combine humor or an interesting visual with a key piece of information, generally, we shed the key piece of information.”
Molesworth mentioned, however, that airlines could make entertaining briefings work if they were able to effectively divorce the humor from the key safety message.
“Using humor or a celebrity is really good to grab someone's attention,” he says. “Now that you've got their attention, you want to ensure that they can process the information provided.”
As long as airlines get millions of views and raving reviews from these big-budget productions, though, the incentives to change just don’t seem to be there.
Safety first. Except, quite possibly, in airline safety videos.
