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KLM We Are An Airline Proved a Brand Can Outthink a Budget
KLM's 'We Are An Airline' is a 2018 integrated campaign created by DDB & Tribal Amsterdam that confronted a specific brand-awareness problem in Germany, where a substantial share of consumers did not recognise KLM Royal Dutch Airlines as an airline at all, using experiential stunts, radio, digital, social media, and film to correct the misconception at scale.
The campaign originated from a striking research finding. Pre-campaign survey data gathered in August 2018 showed that 54% of German respondents recognised KLM as an airline, meaning that nearly half did not, according to reporting by contagious.com and adsoftheworld.com. The recognition gap deepened among younger consumers: among German respondents under the age of 30, brand recognition as an airline fell to just 37%, as documented by shots.net. Germans surveyed associated KLM variously with a restaurant, a radio station, and a bank — three categories that share no obvious relationship with commercial aviation.
Published in The Netherlands in October 2018 and launched in Germany the following month, 'We Are An Airline' was conceived around the principle that KLM needed to meet German consumers where their misconceptions already lived. The campaign is categorised under the Transport and Travel/Leisure industries and was submitted to the international creative archive record by DDB & Tribal Amsterdam. It comprises a single film media asset as its primary documented output, supported by the broader integrated channel mix. The Netherlands-based airline had long held a strong home-market identity, but the German market represented an awareness challenge that no incremental spend on conventional media would efficiently solve. The campaign's central creative logic was to inhabit the very misidentifications — restaurant, bank, radio station — and convert them into proof that KLM was, definitively, an airline.
KLM entered the German market carrying a measurable awareness deficit that its media budget alone could not overcome. Ralf Hesen, Strategy Director at DDB & Tribal Amsterdam, stated publicly that KLM needed to earn media attention rather than outspend competitors, and identified KLM's brand itself as its most differentiating asset, as reported by contagious.com. That framing shaped the entire strategic architecture of 'We Are An Airline.'
The strategic insight was deliberately inverted. Rather than ignoring the misconceptions German consumers held about KLM, the agency turned them into the creative platform. Esther te Pas, Managing Director at DDB & Tribal Amsterdam, described the approach as turning an insight 'on its head,' according to campaignsoftheworld.com. If German consumers thought KLM was a bank, a restaurant, or a radio station, the campaign would build activations around exactly those categories — and then reveal the airline behind each one. The result was a strategy designed to generate earned media amplification, making the campaign's reach significantly larger than its paid footprint would suggest.
In the Netherlands, KLM operates in one of Europe's most competitive aviation environments. The airline's primary network-carrier rivals include Lufthansa Group and British Airways parent International Airlines Group, according to market analysis published on studocu.com. On short-haul leisure routes, low-cost carriers including Ryanair and easyJet compete directly with KLM on price, creating sustained pressure on brand value as a differentiator. In Germany specifically, Lufthansa's home-market dominance made brand salience for a foreign flag carrier even harder to build through conventional advertising. The decision to pursue a high-concept, earned-media-led approach was therefore both a creative and a commercial one, grounded in the practical reality that outspending Lufthansa in its own market was not a viable path.
The creative execution of 'We Are An Airline' operated across multiple channels simultaneously, with each activation designed to dramatise a specific misconception and then dismantle it. Experiential stunts formed the backbone of the campaign, as documented by Little Black Book and contagious.com. A restaurant was set up serving complimentary KLM inflight meals to unsuspecting diners, an ATM-style bank installation offered flight prizes rather than cash withdrawals, and a radio-station takeover replaced conventional programming with airline-related content — each one a direct embodiment of the false associations that German consumers held about the brand.
These activations were built to generate content and coverage, functioning as production sets for film and social media assets as much as standalone consumer experiences. The film asset archived at serves as the primary documented creative output, capturing the reactions and scenarios produced by the stunts and distilling the campaign's central argument into a single shareable piece of content. Campaign music was created by The Flying Dutchman, a detail reported by adsoftheworld.com and lbbonline.com that adds a layer of deliberate wit — the name itself is a reference to Dutch maritime legend, embedding national identity into the sonic branding.
Production credits for 'We Are An Airline' as documented in the public creative record attribute the work to DDB & Tribal Amsterdam as the lead agency, with Esther te Pas named as Managing Director and Ralf Hesen as Strategy Director, both cited in coverage by campaignsoftheworld.com and contagious.com. The campaign's tonal register is confident and self-aware, leaning into the absurdity of the awareness gap rather than treating it as an embarrassment. That creative choice — turning a problem into a punchline — is consistent with KLM's broader history of witty, brand-led communications originating from The Netherlands.
No independently verified post-campaign performance metrics for 'We Are An Airline' are publicly available through the sources consulted for this analysis. The campaign's pre-launch research baseline — 54% overall recognition and 37% recognition among under-30s in Germany, as reported by contagious.com and shots.net — establishes a clear measurement starting point, but published uplift figures have not been confirmed by a named third-party source.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates strong earned-media architecture. The experiential activations in Germany were engineered for shareability, and the integration of film, radio, digital, and social channels around a single coherent insight reflects a disciplined approach to integrated campaign planning. The decision to dramatise consumer misconceptions rather than ignore them is a strategically sound move that would tend to generate press coverage and social amplification above what paid media alone could deliver — consistent with the strategic brief articulated by Ralf Hesen and reported by contagious.com.
'We Are An Airline' holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. That score reflects a campaign with a genuinely sharp strategic premise and a creative execution that earns attention on its own terms, tempered by the limited volume of publicly documented assets — a single archived film unit — and the absence of verified outcome data. The campaign represents a confident, brand-led response to a specific market problem in Germany, and its logic remains instructive for any challenger brand navigating awareness deficits in a competitor's home territory.
'We Are An Airline' was a 2018 KLM campaign created by DDB & Tribal Amsterdam to correct a specific brand misconception in Germany. Pre-campaign research from August 2018 found that nearly half of German consumers did not recognise KLM as an airline, associating it instead with a bank, restaurant, or radio station, according to contagious.com.
DDB & Tribal Amsterdam created 'We Are An Airline' for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. The campaign's named leads include Esther te Pas, Managing Director, and Ralf Hesen, Strategy Director, both of DDB & Tribal Amsterdam, as reported by campaignsoftheworld.com and contagious.com. It was published in The Netherlands in October 2018.
KLM targeted Germany because August 2018 research showed only 54% of German respondents recognised KLM as an airline, with recognition dropping to 37% among those under 30, according to shots.net and contagious.com. Germany represented a meaningful awareness gap that conventional media spend could not efficiently close against dominant local competitor Lufthansa.
The campaign ran three core experiential stunts in Germany: a restaurant serving complimentary KLM inflight meals, an ATM-style bank installation offering flight prizes, and a radio-station takeover with airline programming, as documented by lbbonline.com and contagious.com. Each activation directly embodied a misconception German consumers held about the KLM brand.
'We Are An Airline' holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects a sharp strategic premise and a well-integrated creative execution across film, experiential, radio, and digital channels, balanced against a limited archive of publicly documented assets and the absence of independently verified post-campaign performance metrics.
Strategy Director Ralf Hesen of DDB & Tribal Amsterdam led the strategic rationale, stating that KLM needed to earn media attention rather than outspend competitors, as reported by contagious.com. The agency inverted the awareness problem, building activations around consumer misconceptions to generate organic amplification and make KLM's brand its primary differentiating asset in Germany.
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