You’re the boss of a journey firm, it’s early summer time and your model goes viral. Thousands and thousands of individuals are watching and sharing social media clips of individuals on vacation, the soundtrack to which is your organization jingle.
It seems like a PR dream, however is it?
That’s the query little doubt being contemplated on the headquarters of Jet2 – the funds journey agency that has discovered itself on the centre of a runaway TikTok meme which reveals the much less glamorous aspect of British summer time holidays.
The pattern started as a joke: Jet2’s relentlessly cheerful jingle, Jess Glynne’s Maintain My Hand, performed over essentially the most cheerless summer time vacation footage discovered on social media.
Aircraft fights, water sports activities accidents and drunken disasters are all soundtracked by the theme tune because the tagline “Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” is introduced the saccharine voiceover.
The road has turn out to be social media code for journey plans gone flawed, with customers pairing the audio with clips of vacation mishaps, minor chaos and something that falls wanting the same old polished posts.
In a single TikTok video with greater than 1.6m likes, a girl nearly drowns in waist-high water and needs to be saved by a lifeguard after popping out of a water slide in Tenerife.
One other publish set to the sound with 16k likes reveals a person laying on a solar lounger by the pool as rain drenches him. Greater than 1.3m different movies have used the sound and the hashtag #nothingbeatsajet2holidays has greater than 25.5k posts.
Jet2 has not commented on the pattern, however the firm has leaned into it on social media, posting its personal clip utilizing the identical audio and launching a problem, providing a £1,000 vacation voucher as a prize.
Zoë Lister, the voice actor who utters the now well-known line, and singer Jess Glynne have each weighed in. Glynne posted a TikTok video miming the voiceover, and Lister has appeared on radio re-enacting the famed slogan.
Campaigns like Jet2’s problem present how manufacturers are attempting to fulfill customers the place they’re, however doing so means studying to talk the platform’s language, mentioned Dr Andreas Schellewald, a researcher in digital tradition.
“From a brand point of view, this is still tricky terrain and more tactical rather than strategic. This definitely adds great reach for the Jet2 brand – at the same time, brand marketing is not just about awareness but also resonance and reaction, for which I assume brands usually still prefer to have more control over how they are perceived publicly”, he mentioned.
The advert might have discovered new life as a meme, however its social media DNA was there from the beginning, in line with Adam Gordon, a social media strategist and co-founder of the social media company a Pleasant Bunch.
“The original Jet2 TV ads were deliberately social media led – the hold my hand line was always married to an on-screen POV shot of someone holding someone’s hand – a classic Instagram holiday shot – so the seeds were sown early, and deliberately.
“The irony is that the Jet2 ad was born out of the old glossy age of Instagram perfection, but this meme has dragged it into the messy imperfection of the TikTok era. A crystal clear sign of the times in the world of social media,” he added.
