For the first time in eight years Air NZ launched a brand campaign; the creative for the campaign “Where to next?” featured sunrises, showing that each new day brings new opportunities.

Flights are frequently on sale, so a point of difference was needed in a highly competitive market in order to get cut through, build on the brand campaign and, importantly, drive bookings with this sale. Not an easy task to do.

‘Dawn Deals’ was a world first, where people could watch the sunrise live in 19 destinations around the world. As the sun rose in the destination, it would count down and trigger incredible deals upon sunrise. Deals had never been released in the middle of the night before, but were dependent on the time of the sunrise in each destination.

YouTube Now Beta technology enabled 19 camera people to log in from around the world. Webcams, mac books and Wirecast encoding were also used. Usually mobile can’t stream video, but a way was found to make live stream video work on mobile – grabbing frames in a fast sequence so it appeared to be ‘live’. This, too, had not been done before!

Engagement went through the roof, with week 4 having 1,984 users on at 4am and 14,147 by 7am. Every week throughout the campaign had hundreds of people on the site overnight. People were literally getting out of bed to book fights. Dawn Deals made this never before seen behaviour happen.

Also for the first time, there was constant contact with Air NZ’s IT team and sales platform to ensure the seat counter functionality would pass traffic through and show accurate numbers of seats remaining.

Not only did 90% of the deals sell out, but the sale resulted in incremental bookings to 8 of the destinations.