It was August 2010. One of the first big advertising campaigns I got to work on while I was a strategist at an advertising agency. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines had asked us to do a campaign about location based services – a pretty new field in digital those days.
We came up with the idea of KLM Surprise: based on open information people sharded on their social media profiles, we would surprise them with random of kindness to explore how this happiness would spread. It was insanely fun and rewarding to do. Not only to explore how to “get to know” people through their social media profiles, but also the logistics of spotting people and surprising them within a very limited amount of time.
We had been dry-running for three weeks before starting the campaign. And it was amazing. Passengers were super excited and happy. I was super grateful to the agency (Boondoggle Amsterdam), my colleagues (Tom, Astrid, Gaston) and KLM (Tjalling, Anna, Lonneke, Simonette) to be able to do this.
And then a tweet came in.