What kind of news would be good enough to get the general public dancing in the streets? The abolition of income taxes? Free CBD gummies for everyone?
How about the chance to preselect your seat when you fly Southwest Airlines?
If that last bit fails to stir untrammeled jubilation in your soul, it sure seems to have others excited—at least, those shown in the latest spot from Southwest, which debuts today.
Created by GSD&M, this half-minute frolic kicks off with a Southwest flight attendant announcing: “America, are you sitting down? Southwest is introducing assigned seating!” Whereupon rapturous citizens leap over tables, do high kicks in the street, and dance in a public fountain.
While the spot’s obvious aim is to signal the end of Southwest’s pick-any-seat boarding policy, it’s also clearly a bid to nudge the public’s perception of the brand back to its glory days. (In fact, Laura Branigan’s 1982 earworm “Gloria” is the musical track on this one.)
The attendants don’t dress like this anymore, but the irreverent humor mostly endures.
By moving to preselected seating, Southwest director of brand and content Julia Melle told ADWEEK that the carrier is simply responding to shifting demands. “Eighty percent of our customers and 86% of airline customers [overall] prefer assigned seats,” she said, “so we knew we had to take a look at our model and change it.”
The tricky part is that not only was unreserved seating historically a differentiator for the carrier, its “new” offering is one that other airlines have had for decades. So when it came to advertising, the only way to avoid looking ridiculous was to act ridiculous preemptively.
“That over-the-top celebratory nature was important—people going crazy about news that didn’t seem that new to the world,” Melle said. Amping up the satire “feels uniquely Southwest,” she added.
“The tone [of the spot] had to be tongue-in-cheek—anything else would have felt off brand,” added Bill Bayne, group creative director at GSD&M. “This is a brand that’s been doing its own way of seat selection for years, so we knew it was important to show that we ‘get it.’ So we used humor and a healthy dose of self-awareness. As Herb Kelleher said, ‘We take our competition seriously, not ourselves.’
Bayne is referring to Southwest’s founder, the chain-smoking, bourbon-pounding maverick who sketched out his airline’s business plan on a cocktail napkin in 1967. In addition to its budget prices, Southwest—famous in the early years for its jokey flight attendants in hot pants—has always laid claim to being America’s “love” airline, your cool friend in the sky.
In the new spot, the guy in a bar who hears the news about assigned seating (“I can’t believe nobody’s ever thought of this before,” he quips) is a nod to Kelleher, who died in 2019.
Humor isn’t just the animating force of the spot, it’s arguably among the few differentiators Southwest can still easily use. (Though it has done some far-out marketing of late.) Not only is preselected seating (which also includes optional upgrades for more legroom) the norm for every other carrier, so are bag fees—and Southwest announced the end of its bags-fly-free policy 22 days ago.
Melle denied that the current spot was timed to counter that rueful revelation: “This was already in the works,” she said. But Ian Baer, founder and CEO of marketing intelligence company Sooth, said that the ad—jovial as it may be—still has its work cut out for it.
“This is a charming, bouncy spot—but I wish it were coming from a brand other than Southwest,” he said. “It lands more like: ‘We’re not like other airlines. We’re a cool airline! Except… now we’re just like the others.’”
In the consumer’s mind, he said, “taking beloved benefits away from loyal customers isn’t a topic for musical comedy.”
Perhaps not, but Southwest is clinging to the charm and bounce it’s long been known for. It’s also held onto another longstanding tradition of slipping employees into its ads. The flight attendant in the ad is a real one based out of Chicago O’Hare.
Just line up and grab a seat, ma’am: Southwest’s legacy boarding policy in action.
