I don't think the current video format is very good for retention. Putting it in the form of a quiz could help frequent travelers actually memorize the information over time, which could in turn save lives.
I don’t know whether it would be legal, but I 100% agree with your suggestion - a more active form of learning would be more effective. Professor Molesworth (the expert I interviewed for the article) actually suggested that airlines should make passengers count how many seats away from the emergency exit they’re sitting - again, making that a more active process.
There’s also the argument that to improve retention, the regulatory body should decrease the amount of “key safety messages” that need to be included in the videos (which ends up being around 35-45). If you decrease that number, retention of the info you do mention should go up.
Why do you think airlines spend so much money on these safety videos when they're almost exclusively shown to people who are already customers of the airline? The 2m YouTube example you gave is great, but
1. that's probably an exception to most safety videos and
2. the vast majority of safety video views are probably uninterested folks in cramped seats with earphones in.
Do you think that's the best use of marketing dollars? What about making the actual product (flight experience) better?
Good question. I asked myself the same thing. Since airlines are mandated to produce a safety video regardless, the ROI they really have to assess is against that incremental spend on making the video cinematic/entertaining. And if you factor in that potential to go viral and get good PR from it, as well as the fact that they can produce a video once and reuse possibly for X years, the incremental investment doesn’t sound that unappealing. Also: traditional methods of advertising (say renting a billboard) are just as expensive, if not more.
It’s a captive audience which you can directly target for retention. In 3 months when they go to buy another plane ticket they’ll remember the catchy funny video and associate that airline with positive feelings when making a choice.
> Why do you think airlines spend so much money on these safety videos when they're almost exclusively shown to people who are already customers of the airline?
It reinforces the brand. Virgin gets to show it's sexy. ANA that it's fun but sophisticated. United that it has four neurons firing across the enterprise.
I have no special information, but some of these seem targeted at least partially to internal marketing and morale. For instance, I have seen what appear to be employees (probably union members) delivering a lot of these lines.
I would expect it's at least slightly better for morale, recruiting, and retention. I also expect that executives and middle managers move to use these as an opportunity to reinforce corporate values, whatever that means to them.
Good point, yes - the director of the United video (Karim Zariffa) told me that during the shoot the employees were highly invested (they didn’t want to make a mistake on camera) and the whole shoot likely helped boost employee morale.
That’s super slimy of them — a while back I had spent some time investigating fake reviews on their platform [1] and also found that their moderation team has no strict processes in place to deal with bad actors.
unironically i can see an interesting biz model, pay $200 and get:
- financial report: does it make sense to join now, at this valuation? how much stock should you ask for? what's the market growth looking like?
- reference check past employees who worked there
- glassdoor review analysis (fake reviews? helpful reviews?)
- past layoffs?
- legal side / open lawsuits?
great point! I don't think your average candidate would do this, but I guess this was an exercise in formulating what such a check could look like. it's overkill for sure, but I do think that accessing this type of info can be valuable.
though i'd say the questions I brainstormed in the bullets are the type candidates should definitely be asking during their interview process
How do you maintain motivation to keep applying to jobs when tracking with data like this? After seeing countless posts on r/dataisbeautiful or similar where people detail number of applications > number of replies > interviews > eventual success, I tried for myself in the last hunt - and then stopped tracking it once I got to around line 55 in the spreadsheet and only 3 responses - all automated rejections
Eventually figured out it was more worth my time to just go with whatever recruiters were reaching out that week
Full disclosure: I did this as an experiment for an article (https://www.careerfair.io/online-maze) and as such my motivation to keep applying was driven by the piece of content I was creating. In addition, a lot of the time I wouldn't actually press the "submit" button - I would just stop my timer. Again, my goal was to create a cool, accurate piece of content that could spark interesting discussion, which did end up happening (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37753292).
I’m a writer working on a piece on referral bonuses. If you don’t mind, could you email me at shikhar@careerfair.io? I’d be curious to learn more, thanks!!
