Offering travelers from Seattle and Northwest Washington a time-saving choice for commercial air flights to popular US destinations
Creative strategy
Content development
media strategy
animation
increase in traffic to the Snohomish County Paine Field page
increased traffic to the Propeller Airports site
Increased consideration, word of mouth, and intent to try PAE
Momentum toward higher passenger volume and repeat use
Background
For many Puget Sound travelers, flying means defaulting to Seattle’s largest airport out of habit. Awareness of Paine Field Airport (PAE) remained low, even as new routes expanded its reach. The challenge wasn’t product quality; PAE already delivered a best-in-class experience. The challenge was behavioral: persuading travelers to break routine, reconsider their assumptions, and recognize that a premium, stress-free airport experience was closer—and easier—than they thought.
What We Saw
To move PAE from unknown to undeniable, our strategy reframed traditional airport decision criteria as PAE’s most ownable advantages—turning category expectations into reasons to choose it. We anchored all work in three pillars:
Lead with experience Replace the stress travelers expect with the comfort they don’t—ease instead of hassle, calm instead of chaos, and a journey that feels intentionally better from curb to gate.
Emphasize convenience Underscore PAE’s proximity, speed, and time savings to prove that your trip begins when you arrive at the airport, not just when you land.
Be a credible alternative
Make choosing PAE feel just as simple—if not smarter—than defaulting to larger airports.
To activate this strategy, we intercepted travelers where they naturally are—at work, on their commute, and in the flow of everyday life—and at the critical moments that shape airport choice: researching routes, comparing prices, and booking flights. Contextually relevant media and creative reframed PAE not as a compromise, but as the intuitive upgrade hiding in plain sight.
What We DID
We repositioned Paine Field Airport as more than a transit point—an extension of home: calm, familiar, and designed around you. Creatively, we leaned into that feeling with intimate, luxury-style photography—driveway departures, uncrowded gates, easy curbside moments—paired with handwritten annotations and strike-through edits that mimicked real trip planning. This visual language made the message feel personal and unscripted, reinforcing the airport’s human scale while literally crossing out the pain points of larger hubs (traffic, lines, chaos) to spotlight what Paine Field removes.
This was complemented by a media approach engineered for high-frequency impact among likely users. We dominated the I-5 corridor and key Eastside and North Sound business centers with large-format out-of-home on primary commuter routes, then reinforced that presence with geo-targeted digital and paid search timed to active trip-planning windows.
Together, the creative’s personal reassurance and the media’s precision reach transformed Paine Field from lesser-known alternative into an obvious choice, communicating both the emotional relief and practical advantage: a smoother, lower-stress journey from driveway to destination that simply feels right.
