Mauricio Parise was a college student in his native Brazil when he started working for Delta Air Lines as a sales agent. That was 18 years ago, and the 39-year-old has never worked anywhere else. Now he’s director of worldwide marketing communications for the airline, managing Delta’s brand strategy and translating it in creative ways to engage customers.
Parise says his challenge is to take a brand that is more than 85 years old and demonstrate its relevance for the future for multiple audiences, including younger, tech-savvy generations.
“They often don’t see airlines as the most innovative and progressive brands that they deal with,” Parise says.“As we think of anything we do—any communications, any events, any activations—we have to positively disrupt. We have to differentiate ourselves. We have to surprise people in a way they don’t expect an airline, especially Delta, to behave.”
Some of the most notable examples of this thinking have been the brand’s activations at TED, with agency partner MKG. In 2014, Delta created “Social Soul,” a digital experience that surrounded guests with content from their Twitter stream and then displayed the stream of another conference attendee with similar interests.
In 2015, the airline invited TED attendees to sit inside a “stillness capsule” to understand how being calm and still can spark creativity and productivity.
This year, to tie to the conference theme of “Dreams,” the airline invited guests inside “Ascend,” a dark space lined with netting holding 6,000 LED bulbs to evoke the feeling of the night sky. As guests climbed around the floor and walls, the lights shifted and changed in reaction to their movements. “At the end of the experience ... folks went to a computer and started sharing their ideas on how we should be evolving travel, tomorrow and 30 years from now,” Parise says. Delta will select some of those ideas to test in its new research lab, the Hangar, at Georgia Institute of Technology.
In addition to these unique activations, Delta has also received attention in the past year for the shuttle service it has offered for select celebrities and influencers to events such as the Sundance Film Festival, South by Southwest, and TED. “It’s all about creating something you don’t expect from an airline and driving that conversation,” Parise says. “Ultimately as we think about events and activations, it’s only worth it if you get conversation around it.”
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