Brandon GeorgeCreative Director Start Something

A3 ATLANTA · 2013–2020 · DELTA AIR LINES 03 · They don't care

A loyalty program that only knew how to count started telling stories instead.

SkyMiles mentions on Instagram went up 278% in a year. #SkyMilesLife became the first travel search engine fueled by Instagram. Viola Davis narrated the whole thing.

A Delta wing over a sunset, the Milestones manifesto set across it: Nobody travels the world like Medallion Members do.
The Milestones manifesto. The one asset on this site with room to spareDelta Air Lines

The stakes

For Delta’s SkyMiles members, the loyalty program was all transaction and zero emotion.

That is a genuinely dangerous position for a brand that size. When your most valuable customers only relate to you as an arithmetic problem, you have no defense the moment a competitor’s arithmetic gets better. Points are the easiest thing in the world to outbid.

Nobody was going to fall in love with a balance.

The move

Stop counting the miles. Start telling the stories the miles were made of.

The Milestone Awards found seventeen record-setting Medallion Members and thirteen remarkable Delta employees. Actual people, with numbers so absurd they’d become narratives. We treated them the way an awards show treats a career. Anthem film narrated by Viola Davis. Profiles of the SkyGrammers, the Go Gifters, the Mega Milers. A winner’s package that arrived in a TUMI suitcase with a trophy, a brass luggage tag, and a handwritten note. We launched it in Los Angeles, because L.A. is where awards shows live.

#SkyMilesLife went further and gave the program back to the members. Ads onboard every flight asked travelers to share their photographs. Every photo became fuel for a search engine that let the next traveler find their next destination through somebody else’s eyes. The world’s first travel search engine built out of Instagram.

The Path You Make made it personal at scale: 750,000+ of Delta’s most loyal customers each received a film recapping their own year of travel.

The proof

Five Delta Milestone Awards category cards, each with a gold trophy object and a question naming a record a member set
The categories. Mega Miler, SkyGrammer, Go Gifter Delta Air Lines · 2013–2020
A mosaic of member travel photographs under the line 32K+ photos on #SkyMilesLife
#SkyMilesLife. 32,000 member photographs, and counting Delta Air Lines · 2013–2020
Frames from three personalised films: Brock’s, Julie’s and Alberto’s Medallion journeys, with each member’s own mileage and city counts
The Path You Make. One film per member, 750,000 times Delta Air Lines · 2013–2020
A results slide: SkyMiles mentions on Instagram up 278% year over year, positive sentiment up 90.5%, 26% click-through to flight search, trips booked with miles up 40%
What it moved, as the campaign reported it Delta Air Lines · 2013–2020

The receipts

What the program did in the year after it stopped counting and started telling stories. Off the campaign’s own results slide, shown above, so you can read it yourself:

+278% SkyMiles mentions on Instagram, year over year
+90.5% positive social sentiment, year over year
+40% trips booked with miles, year over year
26% clicked through to search flights

And the scale it ran at:

30,000+ member photographs contributed to #SkyMilesLife. And counting. 750,000+ personalized films delivered for The Path You Make. 10 million+ unique data points generated across those videos.

The hardware

Atlanta ADDYs: Gold, Microsites · Silver, Social Media Campaign · Silver, Online/Interactive Campaign · Gold, Data Driven Media · Silver, Innovative Use of Interactive/Technology · Bronze, Copywriting

Regional ADDYs: Gold, Online/Interactive Social Media Campaign · Silver, Cross-Platform Online/Interactive · Silver, Data Driven Media · Silver, Innovative Use of Interactive/Technology

The credit

Digitas Atlanta, across seven years and four Delta programs.