SkyTeam's 2017 'Being A Traveler' campaign, created by BETC Paris and BETC Content, launched a five-episode web series profiling expert travelers across global
How SkyTeam Used Branded Content to Reframe What It Means to Travel
SkyTeam's 'Being A Traveler' is a 2017 branded content web series, created by BETC Paris and BETC Content in France, that profiles five expert travelers from around the world to showcase the alliance's global reach and passenger lifestyle credentials across social media, member-airline digital platforms, and airport lounges.
SkyTeam, the global alliance of 20 airlines, launched the series under the title SkyTeam Stories on May 2, 2017. The campaign originated in France and was distributed internationally through SkyTeam's own social media channels, a dedicated section of the SkyTeam website, member-airline digital platforms, and airport lounge screens across the alliance's network. Each film follows a different traveler — drawn from various parts of the world — who brings domain expertise to their relationship with travel, allowing the series to speak to a self-identified traveler audience rather than a generic flying public.
The campaign was designed in two phases. The first, launching in May 2017, comprised the SkyTeam Stories films themselves. The second phase, planned for June 2017, introduced a digital activation in the form of an online quiz inviting the public to identify which traveler type they most closely resemble, paired with a contest offering a world tour prize tailored to the winner's stated travel preferences. This dual structure gave Being A Traveler both a passive viewing dimension and an interactive participation layer, broadening its potential audience engagement across the French market and beyond. The campaign represents a deliberate move by SkyTeam away from the institutional, service-led advertising that had characterised airline alliance communications, toward a content-first approach built around personality, expertise, and shared passion for travel.
SkyTeam made a conscious decision in 2017 to lead with human stories rather than network statistics. The strategic logic rests on a simple consumer insight: frequent travelers do not primarily define themselves by the airline they fly — they define themselves by the kind of traveler they are. Being A Traveler speaks directly to that self-concept, using the SkyTeam Stories format to position the alliance as a curator of travel identity rather than a supplier of seats.
The competitive context makes this shift legible. In 2017, the three major global airline alliances — Star Alliance, SkyTeam, and oneworld — collectively represented roughly 60% of international airline traffic, according to sia-partners.com. Within that group, Star Alliance led with approximately 38% of the three-alliance market, SkyTeam held around 33%, and oneworld accounted for the remaining 29%, per sia-partners.com. Star Alliance and oneworld both maintained strong institutional brand presences in France and across Europe during this period, making differentiation through brand character, rather than network size alone, a credible strategic priority for SkyTeam. Against competitors of comparable scale, a content series built around traveler archetypes offered SkyTeam a tone of voice that alliance route maps and lounge comparisons could not.
The June 2017 quiz mechanic reinforced this positioning. By inviting users to self-classify as a traveler type, BETC Paris created a data-informed engagement tool that simultaneously personalised the brand experience and generated audience signals about travel preferences — a structure that aligns with the broader shift toward owned-media engagement that was gaining momentum across the French market and the wider European travel sector during this period.
BETC Paris structured Being A Traveler as a multi-episode branded web series, a format that requires sustained narrative discipline across individual films while maintaining enough episodic variety to hold a diverse audience. The agency, working alongside its dedicated content unit BETC Content, applied a documentary-adjacent visual grammar to each episode — following its subject through real travel contexts rather than constructing aspirational scenarios from scratch.
The five featured travelers function as distinct character archetypes. Each is presented as an expert in a specific domain connected to their travel life, which gives every episode a point of view beyond the journey itself. This approach avoids the soft-focus lifestyle imagery that dominates much airline advertising and instead anchors the series in credibility and specificity. The result is content that earns its place on a social feed through genuine curiosity value, rather than demanding attention through production spectacle alone.
Distribution was integrated into the creative brief from the outset. The films were designed to work across multiple surfaces — SkyTeam's social media channels, the dedicated SkyTeam Stories space on the alliance's website, member-airline digital platforms, and airport lounge screens — which imposed real constraints on pacing, captioning, and narrative self-containment. Each episode needed to function as a standalone piece while belonging coherently to the series as a whole. Production credits for the Being A Traveler campaign are not publicly documented. The campaign's creative leadership rested with BETC Paris, with BETC Content overseeing the branded content production dimension, representing one of the earlier high-profile activations of BETC's dedicated content arm in France.
No verified performance data for the Being A Traveler campaign is publicly available. SkyTeam has not published viewership figures, social engagement rates, quiz participation numbers, or contest entry volumes in any source traceable to the 2017 SkyTeam Stories launch. No campaign-specific reviews from Campaign, Ad Age, or comparable trade press have been identified.
Structural analysis of the campaign nevertheless points to several meaningful effectiveness indicators. The dual-phase architecture — films in May, interactive quiz and contest in June — was designed to sustain audience engagement across a six-to-eight-week window rather than generating a single spike of attention. The personalisation logic embedded in the traveler quiz aligns with established principles of digital audience retention: users who self-classify within a brand's framework develop a higher degree of brand affinity than passive viewers. The distribution across airport lounge screens, member-airline digital platforms, and social media created meaningful reach redundancy, ensuring that SkyTeam's 20-airline network could carry the campaign to high-value travelers at multiple touch points on a single journey.
Being A Traveler also represents a historically significant creative inflection point for SkyTeam. The alliance's earlier 'Caring Hands' campaign, created by BETC Euro RSCG in 2002 and supported by an media buy reported at approximately eighteen million US dollars according to clapboard.com, led with service assurance. Being A Traveler led with identity — a shift that reflects a broader evolution in how airline brands communicate value in an era of content saturation. Clapboard scores this campaign 63 out of 100, reflecting solid strategic intent and a well-constructed content format that is modestly constrained by limited public documentation of outcomes.
'Being A Traveler' is a 2017 branded web series by SkyTeam, created by BETC Paris and BETC Content in France. Titled SkyTeam Stories, it profiles five expert travelers from around the world, distributing episodes across SkyTeam's social channels, its website, member-airline digital platforms, and airport lounges from May 2, 2017.
BETC Paris created the Being A Traveler campaign for SkyTeam. The branded content production was handled by BETC Content, the agency's dedicated content unit. Both worked in partnership with SkyTeam to develop and distribute the SkyTeam Stories web series across multiple digital and physical surfaces in 2017.
SkyTeam structured Being A Traveler in two phases. The first launched the SkyTeam Stories films on May 2, 2017. The second, in June 2017, introduced an online quiz allowing users to identify their traveler type, alongside a contest offering a personalised world tour prize tailored to each participant's stated travel preferences.
SkyTeam distributed the Being A Traveler series across its own social media channels and a dedicated website section. Member airlines within the 20-airline SkyTeam alliance also screened the films in airport lounges and on their own digital platforms, giving the France-originated campaign a genuinely global distribution footprint from launch.
Clapboard rates Being A Traveler 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's coherent strategic shift from service-led airline messaging to a traveler-identity content format, while acknowledging that limited public documentation of performance outcomes and production credits constrains a fuller evaluation of the 2017 BETC Paris work.
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