My 2020 Travel Project - Air France-KLM, Flying Blue | Clapboard Ad Archive
My 2020 Travel Project from Air France-KLM and Flying Blue, devised by Dentsu for the travel and leisure sector, stands as a vivid case study in pandemic-era communications: a branded narrative charged with emotional relevance and built precisely for the moment when travel ambitions felt most fragile. Rooted in the lived experience of influential Flying Blue member and photographer Jonathan Bertin, who saw his dream voyage to Tokyo stalled by global border closures in Year 2021, the campaign sidesteps direct promotion in favor of a deeply human story of longing, resourcefulness, and enduring wanderlust. Instead of shelving the journey, Flying Blue invited Bertin to mobilize a network of local contacts to capture on his behalf the memories and sights he could not reach in person, with this act of vicarious exploration documented and disseminated across the loyalty program’s community—which numbers 20 million globally. The approach is unmistakably what Clapboard’s taxonomy would recognize as FORMAT#5—Exemplary Story, in which the product or service plays an indispensable role in the unfolding and resolution of the narrative itself. Here, Flying Blue transcends the usual role of a loyalty scheme, positioning itself as a facilitator not just of physical travel, but of the travel mindset—even when planes stay grounded. The campaign leverages the powerful truism that travel is equally about stories and connections as it is about ticketed miles, using Bertin’s emotional journey and the distributed act of photographic storytelling to draw members and the broader travel community into a participatory narrative. Dentsu’s work is acutely aware of wider consumer sentiment: with travel plans on hiatus across the world, aspirational communications risked becoming tone-deaf unless they addressed both disappointment and hope with authenticity. By reframing the lost trip as an opportunity to connect, create, and share remotely, the campaign elevates Flying Blue’s brand proposition above transactional value, making membership about collective experience and emotional resonance. Its immersive content format and integration across digital platforms keeps the audience at the center, inviting engagement with both the campaign’s interactive microsite and the program’s long-term narrative of exploration. The campaign earns a 67/100 in Clapboard’s global creative archive. In a sector where loyalty is typically measured in segments and upgrades, My 2020 Travel Project signals to the industry the value of treating brand communities as story audiences, especially when external constraints make real-world experience impossible.
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