Air New Zealand’s epic safety video via Weta Workshop clocks up 16 million views in one week

Wednesday 29, October 2014

With close to 120,000 people viewing it online every hour, Air New Zealand’s latest Hobbit-inspired safety video, The Most Epic Safety Video Ever Made, has become the airline’s most popular video to date, clocking up a record 16 million online views within a week of release. […]

The large-scale viewing of the safety video reflects the fans enthusiasm for the December release of the highly anticipated The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, a production of New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures (MGM).

The video has been viewed by more than eight million viewers on YouTube, six million on Facebook and a further 1.6 million on Youku in China. It has also been featured in numerous media outlets worldwide including CNN, NBC News, the Daily Mail and The Telegraph.

Air New Zealand head of global brand development Jodi Williams says the airline is thrilled by the popularity of the video.

Says Williams: “We set out to make the most epic airline safety video ever to celebrate our three-year partnership with The Hobbit films and the uptake has been just that. The number of people watching it, the feedback from customers and the coverage generated by global media outlets has been outstanding.”

The Most Epic Safety Video Ever Made has quickly eclipsed the airline’s first Hobbit-inspired safety video, An Unexpected Briefing (2012) which clocked up more than 12 million global online views.

source: Campaign Brief

Watch Behind the Scenes of The Most Epic Safety Video Ever Made released today. Taika is truly a wizard (by the way, ‘taika’ i Finnish means ‘magic’).