• by Tanya Gazdik , April 11, 2011

Virgin America is launching a marketing campaign designed to convey the airline's "hip, innovative and fresh guest experience," according to the airline.

The campaign for the Burlingame, Calif.-based airline launched April 8 with video, in-cinema, online video banners, iPad, out-of-home (OOH) and print advertising.

The national effort, with the tagline "Breath of Fresh Airline," strives to showcase unique amenities, such as the touchscreen in-flight entertainment platform "Red," as well as design elements including signature cabin "mood lighting" which transitions across 12 shades based on outside light.

Creative uses an airplane window to frame declarations of Virgin America's mission to reinvent the typical domestic flight experience. The window displays a single moment on a Virgin America flight. Headlines include: "Landing has never been so bittersweet," "Flying has never looked better," "You're far too important to fly bored" and "Life's too short for dull air travel."

The campaign, created by San Francisco-based Eleven Inc., includes Chicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD) interactive boards that invite train riders to snap a picture of themselves in an empty window and share the picture with Virgin America on Twitter using the #VXChi hashtag.

Virgin America has always striven to bring fun back to air travel, said Porter Gale, the company's vice president of marketing. And the journey can be as enjoyable as the destination, Gale adds. "We wanted this campaign to not only convey that point of view and our Virgin sense of humor and style, but also show flyers just how much our unique experience has transformed the status quo of flying," Gale says in a release.

The airline partnered with sister company, Los Angeles-based Virgin Produced and Stun Creative to create videos that allow viewers to experience the amenities. The airline has invited consumers to help decide which video will be featured on Red, by voting on their favorites at Squabbler.com, the new online debate forum from the creators of AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com.

The site gives people a chance to post their 30-second arguments about any topic and allows the site's audience to vote for and select a winner. Virgin America will give away one roundtrip flight to a voter who leaves the most creative and original comment on the Virgin America Squabbler video page.

The campaign also includes a flight trailer -- a first for the airline -- that provides a movie trailer-length peek inside the Virgin America experience that will run in-cinema.

It is hard to verbally convey how different the airline's in-flight experience is, Gale says. "Every day we receive posts, Twitpics, videos and other reviews from our flyers about how much they love our in-cabin experience -- some coming live from 35,000 feet via our fleetwide WiFi," Gale says "This campaign is essentially providing snapshots of the same real-life guest experiences we hear about every day."