Eat your heart out ;-)

I was frustrated. So far KLM is the only airline that offers a wide assortment of gifts that can be ordered online and are handed over by our cabin crew at 30,000 ft. The gifts are beautifully wrapped and come with a personal message of the sender on a card. The only problem was: nobody knew this service existed.

Surprising someone on board with a present is really cool, but how to promote such a service? The difficulty is how to reach the friends of travellers. Quite a challenge. Because, let’s be honest, nobody would ask their friends or family for a gift, right?

The epiphany
On a rainy Tuesday we had a break-through moment. One of my colleagues facilitates in putting the personal message of the ‘givers’ on the Wannagives cards. She told me that most of them are about LOVE. Personal messages like: ‘Oh honey, I miss you already’ and ‘My love. How can I do without you?’.

That was it! Which day of the year is more about suprising your loved ones than Valentines Day? We should assist Cupid in offering the Dutch nation the possibility to suprise their Valentines flying with KLM from Amsterdam on 14 February with a free gift.

We only had 17 days left to organise it all. Fortunately, I love deadlines. It forces to decide fast, it makes things fluent and it requires team work. Only then there is a chance to succeed.

The shoot for the print ad

Challenge accepted
Together with a group of colleagues from different departments within KLM we bought chocolate hearts as Valentine’s gifts, created a love-card, wrote a press release, developed a print ad and bought KLM-blue wraping paper with cute white hearts. Especially for this occasion the cards will be hand written and many more details I won’t bother you with.

It was hard work but also so much fun. Look at these pictures of the shoot for the advertisement. Joris, a strategy director at our ad agency Tribal DDB suddenly starring in the newspaper ad. And how serious can you style a bunch of balloons?

Still on cloud nine, we realized that this can work out, but it also can fail. To me the success is not in the number of gifts that we hand over on Valentine’s Day, but the love we spread and Wannagives being the talk of the town, then I eat my chocolate heart out ;-) Let’s see what happens!