Fly the Branded Skies

 

Airline: Mohawk Airlines

These are posts from Fly the Branded Skies about Mohawk Airlines.

No wings for this airline.

Jingle: Ozark “We’re big on that” (1973)

Listen: Ozark Air Lines: “We're Big On That”

They don’t make airlines like Ozark anymore. That’s not nostalgia. The category no longer exists. Ozark was a local service airline. And the locals had something to prove.   Read more

Jingle: “Mohawk’s Going Your Way” (1968)

Mohawk is going your way.

Listen: Mohawk Airlines: “Mohawk's Going Your Way”

This one’s a bit of a puzzle.

Mohawk Airlines was a regional airline based in upstate New York. It grew quickly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, then was absorbed into Allegheny in 1972. So its advertising hasn’t left the paper trail of national airlines like United or TWA. But here’s what I can deduce.

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Tropes: Those other guys…

Every kind of advertising has—well, let’s call them “conventions.” Airline advertising is no different. This is part of a series of posts on the clichés of airline advertising.

Say you’re a regional airline trying to compete against the established mainline carriers, and you want to make a television commercial. What do you do? Simple! Follow this easy four-step process.

Step one. Cast an actor with comical features to play a businessman. (Bear in mind the advertising formula discovered in the 1980s: large nose + wide-angle lens + close-up = comedy.) Pepper in a few characters from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Step two. Shoot a commercial in which the businessman flies on a different, fictional airline. Make the other airline resemble a train to the gulag.

Step three. Add a comic soundtrack, preferably using a tuba.

Step four. Record a sardonic voiceover that starts with “Those other guys…”

Follow these steps, and what do you get? You get this. (Agency: Livingston & Company)

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