When Travelport unleashed what it no doubt hoped would be a "viral" video to YouTube a few weeks back, it and many others probably weren't expecting it to get as much traction as it did.
The clip featured a group of office workers (presumably travel agents) jumping over tables with, inevitably, one of them landing head first on a desk.
A few weeks on and the video has managed to attract almost 50,000 views on YouTube.
Clearly on to a good thing, Travelport has released another effort. Although not as good as the first, it will appeal to the FAIL-hungry types that spend all day watching such calamity/hilarity on YouTube.
The latest has already fetched 15,000 views of its own:
Contrived to a certain extent because the clips were made using actors/stunt types, if success is measured by the number of views then Travelport will probably be rather happy.
But such activity, where a B2B company makes that often weird (and perhaps unintentional) leap into the world of consumer-facing marketing, does lead to more questions about its motivation than the simple answer of "yay, loads of FAIL freaks have seen our humorous video clips". [Not an official quote]
As it is impossible to segment how many potential travel agent users of Smartpoint (the product Travelport is trying to flog) have seen the video on YouTube compared to so-called normal people, presumably the longer term metric will come by way of counting how many customers switch to the new platform as a result.
Unless, of course, Travelport is simply trying to position itself as a fun lovin' GDS eager to banish the image of a corner of the industry more often associated with Jurassic Park than Jackass.