How to communicate that United is invested in using garbage for good? Well, there was only ever one person… er… grouch for the gig. So we hired him. Introducing United’s first ever Chief Trash Officer (CTO): Oscar the Grouch. We gave the news the fanfare that any C-Suite hire of a global airline would naturally deserve, grabbing headlines for SAF in the process. Oscar’s onboarding process provided the perfect backdrop for some sitcom-style films. Through banter between our grouchy CTO and real United employees, we seamlessly communicated the down-and-dirty facts of sustainable aviation fuel in an entertaining way. The combination of Oscar’s inherent grouchiness with United’s good-natured optimism proved the perfect tone to help educate even the biggest skeptics. In the end, it was a campaign that even a grouch could love.
Every airline burns jet fuel to run their business, but no airline can solve climate change on its own. To meaningfully move the needle on emissions reductions, change must happen at a systemic scale and there’s no greater force in shifting industry than public demand. So United led the charge, and we set out to make Sustainable Aviation Fuel something everyone could understand. We needed to capture attention by turning the complex into something entertaining and simple as your ABCs.
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There was only ever one person.. grouch for the gig. So, we hired him. Introducing United’s first ever Chief Trash Officer: Oscar the Grouch. We gave the news the fanfare that any C-Suite hire of a global airline would naturally deserve, grabbing headlines for SAF in the process. Oscar’s onboarding process provided the perfect backdrop for some workplace sitcom-style entertainment. Through banter between our grouchy CTO and real United employees, we seamlessly communicated the down and dirty facts of sustainable aviation fuel in an entertaining way. The combination of Oscar’s inherent grouchiness with United’s good-natured optimism proved the perfect tone for helping educate the biggest skeptics. In the end, it was a campaign that even a grouch could love. In the first weeks of the campaign, our social content gained over 1.5M organic impressions, 46K engagements and 16 million paid views. According to social listening tool Infegy, the campaign sentiment was 93% positive. Terrible news for a grouch! Our campaign landing page gave consumers an opportunity to contribute to United’s Sustainable Flight Fund, established for co-investment in companies that will lead to increased SAF Production. In the first month of the campaign, over 15,000 individual consumers contributed. (And some even emailed the Chief Trash officer Directly.) United’s CTO grabbed hundreds of headlines, reaching an audience of 644 million. The coverage expanded beyond marketing industry news and into publications like the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Fortune. We successfully launched SAF into the realm of public awareness, and even saw an uptick in SAF announcements from our aviation peers in the weeks following our garbage hire.