Peter Graves still loves his Turkish prisons

Honors this week for oddest Web-address redirect go to an online campaign by Cramer-Krasselt for AirTran airlines. In one of several roundabout allusions to his long-ago role as a pedophilic pilot in Airplane!, actor Peter Graves mentions "TurkishPrisons.com" as a site people spend time on now that the Internet has made them more productive. Typing in that Web address, with some trepidation, Adfreak found itself quickly re-routed to an AirTran site. The point of the campaign is to emphasize that AirTran offers in-flight WiFi service. Whether they care about that or not, viewers who recall the Airplane! movies (with their parodies of the previous decade's disaster-movie genre) will want to check out the campaign just for the pleasure of hearing Graves intone the phrase "gladiator movies" again.

—Posted by Mark Dolliver

Published on July 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Filed under AirTran, Cramer-Krasselt, Dolliver

Can anything make an AirTran flight better?

Cramer-Krasselt's latest campaign for AirTran focuses on phony brainstorming sessions at Mindflow Consulting, supposedly hired to figure out "what AirTran should put on every flight." The two actors work hard in the 15-second clips to elevate the stale-feeling material, and for the most part they do OK, with decent comic timing, delivery and chemistry. They'd be well cast as workmates in a sitcom—perhaps Trust Me would have been better with these two. Some of their discarded brainstormed suggestions—haircuts, Xboxes, Belgian waffles, history lectures—don't sound so implausible, and would go a long way toward reliving the tedium of circling O'Hare for three hours on a foggy night. And they shouldn't discard the notion of balloon animals so fast—a plush variation's been popular on Carnival Cruises for years.

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Published on May 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4)
Filed under Airlines, AirTran, Cramer-Krasselt, Gianatasio