Qantas turns around with help from Olivia Wirth

Olivia Wirth has called it Qantas’s Love Actually moment.

Olivia Wirth; Head of Qantas marketing and communications, at Sydney's Qantas domestic terminal with staff Eduardo Bolton and Kelsey Donohue. Picture: James Croucher

Olivia Wirth has called it Qantas’s Love Actually moment. You know that part of the film where the British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, is reunited with his true love at Heathrow Airport’s ­arrival gate.

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport,” said Grant’s character. “General opinion started to make out that we lived in a world of ­hatred and greed but I don’t see that. It seems to be me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy but it’s always there.

“Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends.”

Wirth said the Hollywood romantic comedy tugs at the heartstrings in much the same way as the airline’s classic Feels Like Home positioning. But the comparison could also apply to the ­airline’s off-again on-again relationship with its customers.

Much loved but increasingly shunned by Australia travellers, the airline was cultivating negative feelings amid almost daily media reports in the financial press about its financial troubles.

Soaring fuel costs and aggressive competition from other airlines led to mass redundancies and jaw dropping losses.

The airline’s annual accounts became a horror story of decline as chief executive Alan Joyce battled to chart a path back to profit and sustainability.

Yet, just one year on, Joyce has masterminded the biggest turnaround in Australian corporate history, turning fiscal 2014’s $2.8 billion net loss into a $557 million net annual profit.

The financial rebound has been matched by a stunning brand revival led by Wirth, the airline’s group executive for Brand, Marketing and Corporate Affairs.

Cost-cutting, restructuring and good management of fuel costs have all played their part, but there’s no question the airline’s warm and uplifting Feels Like Home brand marketing campaign, launched in November 2014, has played a key role.

Put simply, Australians fell back in love with Qantas in 2015. Like long-lost lovers, Australians are once again racing across the airport back into its arms.

Amid all the negative publicity, timing was going to be critical.

“That’s why we started our planning early because we believed at some stage there would be the right time,” Wirth said in an interview with The Australian.

Wirth, who was the reassuring public face of Qantas throughout one of the most turbulent periods in its history, said one of the most important elements of the campaign had been its use of real ­people to lend the ads an authentic feel.

“The Australian public were quite cynical and if we tried to spin or talk about untruths or pushed the story too far it wouldn’t ring true to them. They had a very clear idea around what Qantas meant and how they felt about it and it was very important to try and reflect that,” she said. “That influenced the campaign’s execution in terms of why we have real people in the ads rather than actors — real passengers having experiences. It needed to be authentic so you can see the emotions are real. That Love Actually moment that we captured in the first ads was real. It’s a universal moment.”

Using a new jingle borrowed from a Randy Newman track, the team flew to California to meet the American singer-songwriter.

“This one just felt right. Martha Marlow’s beautiful vocals intensified the emotion behind it. We took a number of different options to Randy. We sat down with him and talked through the idea of the ad. Randy actually helped us craft the score. We gave him some vocal options and he said ‘No, Martha is definitely the one’.

“I Still Call Australia Home is still part of Qantas,” Wirth added. “It’s always going to be part of our anthem, but we felt this was a good way to evolve that idea. If you read the lyrics of both songs, there’s a very similar sentiment.”

For Qantas, the campaign was not only the biggest brand overhaul for the airline since John Singleton’s I Still Call Australia Home in 1997, but in a marked departure from more recent activity the campaign put a heavy weighting on traditional media channels such as TV and cinema in addition to innovative digital media executions.

“I think there were a lot of doubters and naysayers before we put that campaign out thinking there’s no way people are going to be sitting online watching a two-minute ad,” Wirth said.

“But the results of the first and second campaign demonstrated that if you do have good content people are prepared to watch. In some ways it was a traditional approach but using new mediums to get the message out.”

Wirth called in the late adman Neil Lawrence and Labor pollster Tony Mitchelmore in early 2014 to devise a brand overhaul. Contrary to their worst fears, said Wirth, the underlying public perception of the brand was much stronger than they anticipated.

“When customers talked about Qantas they don’t necessarily talk about going away,” she said. “It was always about homecoming stories and also this idea that if they were overseas as soon as they saw the red tail, even before they stepped on the aircraft, they felt they had already arrived home in Australia.”

In a sign the campaign has been embraced by Australians, engagement levels are high with the average completion rate of the online advertisements at 8 per cent. The first TV ad ranked as the second most watched ad on YouTube last year, despite having only launched at the end of the year.

Wirth worked closely with Amanda Hicks, ‎managing director at Acuity Research and Insights, whose key contribution was pointing out the difference between the corporate brand and the consumer brand, and the relationship between the two — an important distinction in light of the gloomy headlines last year.

“There are almost two parts of Qantas. For a while in terms of public perception it felt like it was almost overwhelming,” Hicks said. “What was underneath in terms of the emotional values was held very dear. I was surprised to find out the emotional values were really resilient.”

For Wirth, the success of the campaign comes after a rollercoaster five-year period. She has had to deal with a rolling series of crises, from the near-disaster of QF32 as its engine blew up over Indonesia in 2010 to the bitter tussle with the unions in 2011.

“There was one tweet at the time that summed it all up, which was ‘Stop talking. Start flying’,” she said.