Meet Matti: AIDA’s New Star Cruises To Success

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German cruise line company AIDA and Munich based agency Serviceplan come together for this week’s spotlight ad, which aims for a more distinctive approach to the cruise holiday sector. January is the peak advertising season for cruises and other types of holiday, and most cruise line ads take quite a formulaic approach, with shots of customers enjoying themselves across the ships’ facilities. These ads are positive but generic – they communicate plenty about the category but little about the brand.

What has AIDA decided to do differently? Last year they launched their “Hi AIDA” brand platform, promoting themselves as a friendly company you can communicate with, and putting emotion at the forefront of their campaigns. This winter, they take that strategy to the next level by introducing a brand mascot. Matti the red-bellied lemur makes his debut in this charming new ad, and gets a very positive reaction from our Test Your Ad Pro audience.

Matti makes his way onto an AIDA cruise ship and meets up with a young passenger – the two become friends and roam over the decks, through the lounges and even into the AIDA gift store, with the girl shielding her furry stowaway friend from prying eyes. The ad scores 3.6-Stars on Test Your Ad Pro and gets a strong short-term Spike Rating, both well above the German TV average and predicting short- and long-term impact for AIDA from the commercial.

What makes Matti such a good choice for the ad? The “Hi AIDA” commercial follows a lot of the guidelines we regularly offer as part of our Creative Guidance for brands. For example, adopting a brand mascot – or a Fluent Device as we call them – is a strong strategic move as it means you can build familiarity and positive emotional response at the same time. Having it be an animal is a positive, too – people like animals and get an emotional uplift from their cuteness and the opportunities for humour they bring. And there’s a bouncy, 80s style soundtrack created for the ad to give it a melodic boost. All things we know work well.

But probably the most important thing AIDA and Serviceplan do here is introduce the little girl passenger as a companion for Matti. The ad would have been fun and creative if it was just the lemur on his own, but the girl means the ad has what we call between-ness – a sense of connection and communication between characters, even if it’s non-verbal. As Orlando Wood shows in his Look Out book, between-ness helps ads become much better at getting attention.

Matti the lemur is appearing all over AIDA’s marketing materials and their online presence, as well as starring in this ad. He’s set for a strong run as a mascot, and the response to this ad shows the brand have made a great choice.