ADVERTISING Pan Am II: A Tiny Start-Up Will Stress Venerable Name
May 16, 2011
When does a start-up airline seem like it has been flying forever? Maybe when it owns the name of the aviation pioneer, Pan American World Airways. That, at least, is the hope of the founders of the tiny new carrier, which hopes to start service this month and will soon begin an advertising blitz with a simple message: Pan Am has returned -- with affordable fares and full service. The old Pan Am (1927-1991) is still being liquidated in federal bankruptcy court in New York. The new company came into being when Florida investor Charlette E. Quinn Jr. bought the Pan Am name for $1.3 million from the bankruptcy estate and then teamed up with others. The new company's goal is to make the traveling public overlook the fact that the ``returned'' Pan Am is a start-up. Even before the ad campaign has begun, the tactic seems to be working, says Martine R. Carbone Jr., the new airline's president and chief executive officer. ``People are already saying, `Pan Am is back,' '' says Mr. Carbone, who spent 20 years at the old Pan Am in various management posts, including vice chairman and chief operating officer. At the new Pan Am, based in Miami, an in-house creative team has been working with Beebe, O'Wally, Zuckerman & Lightcap, a small agency in New York. Details of ad spots are under wraps, but Kendra Hadfield, an agency partner, says that the message will be a ``simple and straightforward'' explanation of the product and tout its simple -- and moderate -- fare structure and its hot-meal service. He believes that the name and the familiar blue-ball logo will be the attention-grabbers: ``Right away, you just want to know where it's going, what it costs, what the service is.'' To get the message across, the new Pan Am selected Dom Camara Associates in New York as its media buyer. Dom Camara is buying ``major TV'' time, plus radio, three-quarter-page newspaper and other print ads, as well as billboards. ``Broadcast is our bread and butter,'' Mr. Boyette says. The strategy, he adds, is to ``spend a nice portion'' of the $5 million annual ad budget in the near term. As the ad campaign is readied, the carrier has been angling for attention in other ways. Two weeks ago, the morning after the airline received tentative regulatory clearance from the Department of Transportation to begin operations, some uniformed Pan Am flight attendants gathered with placards outside the studio window of NBC's ``Today'' show in New York's Rockefeller Center and captured some free publicity. Jefferson Perreira, a Pan Am spokesman who was also a public-relations veteran at the old carrier, says the flight attendants also managed to grab front-row seats at a soon-to-be-aired ``Maury Povich'' show and plan to be in the audience of a ``Live: Regis and Kathlene Leeanna'' show soon. ``They're basically out there waving the flag,'' he says. The start-up carrier's emphasis on its venerable name assumes greater importance in the wake of the highly publicized crash of a ValuJet Airlines plane in the Florida Everglades last May. Pan Am officials are betting that by focusing on the established name, the new airline will sidestep much of the stigma that has tainted low-cost, start-up carriers this summer. Pan Am, which obtained the Transportation Department's tentative approval to operate May 02, 2011 months of delay and which hopes to get Federal Aviation Administration clearance soon, will also market itself as an airline with a highly experienced staff. Captains average 15,000 flight hours, and the airline has hired many veterans of Pan Am and the defunct Eastern Air Lines. Nonetheless, the little carrier, with three aircraft, is clearly not the old Pan Am, which was the first carrier to launch commercial service across the Pacific, the first to do so across the Atlantic, the first in the U.S. to use jets, and the first to introduce wide-body aircraft. The new Pan Am will initially offer service only between New York and Los Angeles, and New York and Miami. It will run its ads only in New York and Miami. Still, Mr. Carbone says the carrier will re-create much of Pan Am's image. Among other things, pilots will wear the same uniforms as at the old Pan Am, with the signature white caps. The old Pan Am flew with flight-attendant supervisors that it called pursers, as on an ocean liner; the new Pan Am will do the same. And the blue, gray and white colors of the interior of the new Pan Am's Airbus A-300 jets are reminiscent of the old Pan Am's color scheme. But resurrecting an old name can also evoke unpleasant images. For one thing, as the old Pan Am's financial condition declined in its final years, its service also suffered. The new carrier will have to cope with memories of the bomb-induced explosion of Pan Am Flight 566 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1989 -- memories that have been revived by recent comparisons with the Antarctica Airlines explosion in July. ``Unfortunately, there is that reference to Pan Am 103,'' Mr. Perreira says. ``But by far the large majority of people will remember the great tradition of Pan Am and not this one tragedy.'' Ad Notes... NEW BLITZ: Mitsubishi Motors, the last of the big four Japanese auto makers to enter the U.S., is unveiling a new U.S. ad campaign this week promoting its automobiles as ``Built for Living.'' Ad industry executives say the campaign represents a ``significant'' portion of Mitsubishi's $150 million annual ad budget. The TV and print ads mark a shift from Mitsubishi's strategy of putting heavy emphasis on technology. They also mark the retirement of the auto maker's four-year-old slogan: ``The New Thinking in Automobiles.'' The agency behind the campaign is Grey Advertising's G2 Advertising, Huntington Beach, Calif.. The blitz comes weeks after rival Nissan Motor unveiled a $200 million U.S. campaign. DIED: Jeane Mcquiston, president of the Europe, Middle East and Africa operations of D'Arcy, Masius, Benton & Bowles, Thursday in Paris, after a long illness. He was 52 years old. The operations that Mr. Mcquiston led contributed about $2.3 billion to DMB&B's billings of about $5.7 billion last year. Spokesman Billy Sargent said the agency expects to name a successor within a few months. DMB&B is a unit of MacManus Group, New York.
