New Cessna YouTube Video Scores a Homerun

Nothing makes me smile more than seeing good advertising. For example, the other night on television I saw a great commercial for JG Wentworth, a company of which I’d never heard. Yet their use of opera singers and subtitles to communicate about their product was engaging and left me with a clear impression of their name and services after a single viewing. That’s rare in a channel surfing world where I do everything I can to ignore commercials.

So you can imagine that I was grinning from ear-to-ear when I saw...

the new YouTube video Cessna created and placed on their www.GetHomeonTime.com website. The marketing world is changing rapidly and companies must get even more creative in reaching potential customers through YouTube videos, websites, Facebook applications, bloggers and a range of other vehicles. Not only did Cessna create a classy YouTube video, but they let other bloggers and me know about it. Clearly Cessna is not only a company that understands general aviation (duh!), but they also get the new marketing paradigms. Not only is that cool, but it’s important if we’re going to have a growing, thriving General Aviation market because, as you may have noticed, there are plenty of hurdles to growing the pilot population.

Best of all, the video is not only on the web, but will be playing over the next couple of months on the Jumbotron in Times Squares. Yes, I did PhotoShop the picture, but I couldn’t resist visualizing what it's going to look like seeing a Cessna Citation prominently displayed on that big screen overlooking 7th Avenue in New York.

The Cessna website gives a succinct summary of the video: We followed two businessmen from Chattanooga, both with the same destination: an office building on 42nd Street in Times Square, New York. We booked one on the most direct commercial flight we could find, and the other on a private Cessna Citation CJ2+. With camera crews following their every movement, we got a side-by-side perspective of just how important your chosen method of air transport can be. In the end, you just have to ask yourself: are you ready to get your life back?

Watching the video made me want to run out and buy a Citation. Having flown one last month, I can tell you that these jet guys have it made. The airplane is easy to fly and power management is so simple that it makes anyone who has tried to argue the relative merits of lean of peak versus rich of peak leaning (me) want to cry.

So look at the video and send it to all of your non-pilot friends that complain about airline travel and the TSA. Then find them a CFI, sign them up for AOPA's Project Pilot, and get them started. Who knows, in a few years, they may be asking you to fly with them in their new Citation.

And finally, a tip of the hat to Jack Pelton and his team at Cessna. You hit this one out of the ballpark. Great job!

Comments

[Eric Fletcher]

But he talks on his blackberry while in flight.....