airBaltic Finds the Emotional Heart of Holiday Travel in Latvia
airBaltic's "Let's Be Together This Christmas" is a December 2018 film campaign created by DDB Latvia that uses the metaphor of paper planes to tell a long-distance love story, culminating in a plane folded from an airBaltic ticket to unite two people across distance during the holiday season.
Published in Latvia in December 2018, the campaign carries a single media asset — one film — built around the universal themes of love and togetherness. Where many airline Christmas campaigns default to spectacle or discount-led messaging, airBaltic and DDB chose restraint, anchoring the narrative in a deeply personal emotional moment: the longing to be with someone far away. In the Latvian market, where air travel from Riga serves as a primary corridor connecting families and couples separated by work or migration across Europe, that emotional premise carries particular weight.
The campaign represents the latest chapter in a documented creative relationship between airBaltic and DDB Latvia stretching back at least to 2013, when DDB produced the carrier's "Happy Holidays" film, according to Ads of the World. That continuity of creative partnership gives the 2018 work a strategic coherence: DDB understands how airBaltic speaks to Latvian audiences, and the brand trusts the agency to carry emotional register over promotional noise. Creative director Vairis Strazds led the 2018 execution, with account direction handled by Didzis Paeglis, according to Ads of the World. The result is a campaign that positions airBaltic not merely as a transport provider but as an enabler of the moments that matter most — a brand philosophy expressed through craft rather than copy.
airBaltic operates as the primary full-service carrier connecting Latvia and the wider Baltic region to the European network.
In Latvia, as in Estonia and Lithuania, outbound labour migration to Western Europe has been a defining social reality for more than a decade. The consequence is a large segment of the population maintaining long-distance relationships — romantic, familial, or both — across national borders. Christmas becomes the annual focal point when that distance becomes most acutely felt, and airline travel becomes not a commodity purchase but an act of love. DDB Latvia identified this consumer truth and built the entire strategic premise of "Let's Be Together This Christmas" around it. The paper plane metaphor works precisely because it is low-tech and intimate in contrast to the industrial scale of commercial aviation, bridging the emotional gap between distance and reunion.
In the competitive landscape of Baltic-origin short- and medium-haul travel, airBaltic faces pressure from low-cost carriers that dominate on price messaging. easyJet, for instance, launched its own European Christmas-adjacent campaign in September 2018 — titled "Imagine," created by agency VCCP with media agency OMD — with a pan-European media budget reported at twelve million euros, according to Econsultancy. That scale of spend favours reach and frequency over narrative depth. airBaltic's strategic counter-position is to own the emotional territory that a price-led competitor cannot credibly occupy. By centering "Let's Be Together This Christmas" on love and togetherness rather than fares or routes, DDB Latvia carved out a brand space that low-cost operators structurally cannot claim. This differentiation is especially relevant in the Latvian market, where airBaltic's identity as a home-grown national carrier gives it a cultural authenticity that foreign budget airlines cannot replicate.
The creative execution of "Let's Be Together This Christmas" rests on a single, economical metaphor: the paper plane.
Under the creative direction of Vairis Strazds, according to Ads of the World, DDB Latvia constructed a narrative in which paper planes become proxies for longing — objects folded and sent across space in place of the person who cannot yet be there. The resolution, in which a plane is made from an actual airBaltic ticket, is the moment where the metaphorical and the commercial intersect with unusual elegance. The ticket transforms from a transactional document into a love letter, and the airline's product becomes inseparable from the emotional outcome it delivers. That structural choice — embedding the brand object at the story's climax rather than its opening — is what separates the film from conventional transport advertising.
The campaign's single-asset format is itself a creative and strategic statement. Where competitors deploy multi-channel, multi-format Christmas campaigns across television, press, cinema, and social media simultaneously, airBaltic committed to one film. That concentration of resource into a single piece of storytelling demands that the craft carry the full weight of the campaign's ambitions. The film's tone aligns with the broader tradition of Latvian emotional restraint — a cultural register that tends toward understatement and sincerity rather than sentimentality. According to La Lv, which ranked "Let's Be Together This Christmas" third in its December 25, 2018 editorial list titled "Neatstās vienaldzīgu: pašmāju reklāmu TOP 20" ("Domestic advertising TOP 20 that will not leave anyone indifferent"), the publication described the campaign as a warm pre-holiday advertisement showing that love and togetherness are the central message. That editorial recognition from a Latvian media outlet confirms the film's tonal calibration landed accurately with its home audience. Account direction was handled by Didzis Paeglis, according to Ads of the World, completing a tightly credited creative team whose work reflects disciplined storytelling over production scale.
No verified performance data for "Let's Be Together This Christmas" is publicly available across major award bodies including Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, and no quantified sales lift or passenger impact has been documented in publicly accessible sources.
What exists in the public record is editorial validation. LA.LV placed the campaign third on its ranked list of the twenty most notable Latvian advertisements of December 2018 — a curatorial judgement that positions the film among the strongest domestic commercial communications of the holiday period, according to LA.LV. For a single-asset film from a national carrier in a relatively small market, third-place editorial ranking in a domestic media outlet's year-end selection represents meaningful cultural penetration.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates effectiveness through coherence rather than scale. The paper plane metaphor is memorable and category-distinctive. The brand integration is earned rather than imposed. The emotional premise maps directly onto a real consumer behaviour — booking flights home for Christmas — without requiring the audience to make a conceptual leap. These are the qualities that drive brand recall and, over time, brand preference in a competitive short-haul travel market. Clapboard scores "Let's Be Together This Christmas" at 63 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes its emotional brief with skill and cultural specificity but whose single-asset format and absence of documented reach or measurable outcome limit the overall assessment. The score acknowledges craft and strategic clarity while noting the constraints of what can be verified from the public record.
"Let's Be Together This Christmas" is a December 2018 film campaign for airBaltic created by DDB Latvia. It uses a paper plane metaphor to tell a long-distance love story, with the narrative culminating in a plane folded from an airBaltic ticket, positioning travel as an act of reunion rather than a transactional purchase.
Creative director Vairis Strazds led the "Let's Be Together This Christmas" campaign at DDB Latvia, with account direction by Didzis Paeglis, according to Ads of the World. The film was produced as a single media asset published in Latvia in December 2018 for airBaltic.
No verified awards data for "Let's Be Together This Christmas" is publicly available across Cannes Lions, D&AD, Clio Awards, the Effie Awards, or The One Show. The campaign was, however, ranked third in LA.LV's December 2018 editorial list of the twenty most notable Latvian advertisements of the holiday period.
airBaltic's single-film emotional approach contrasts sharply with competitors such as easyJet, whose September 2018 "Imagine" campaign ran a twelve-million-euro pan-European media budget across television, press, cinema, and social media, according to Econsultancy. airBaltic chose narrative depth over distribution scale, targeting Latvian cultural resonance over broad reach.
DDB Latvia used paper planes in "Let's Be Together This Christmas" to create an intimate, low-tech metaphor for longing across distance. The paper plane stands in for the person who cannot yet be present, and the final image — a plane folded from an airBaltic ticket — connects the emotional narrative directly to the brand's product.
Clapboard scores "Let's Be Together This Christmas" at 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong emotional craft and cultural specificity within the Latvian market, balanced against the limitations of a single-asset format and the absence of publicly verifiable performance or reach data for the December 2018 film.
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