It seems that Air New Zealand is on a media blitz at the moment.

Just last week they brought out quite a ground breaking, and expensive looking, commercial featuring Rico the sleazy Latino-fox-type puppet and the ever sleazy Snoop Dogg. Doing a rap! Seriously. I will insert it later on in this post.
It is classic, and one imagines that it is destined for a very specific market sector in the US. Well one imagines it is but you never know. So far it has garnished massive chatter and been seen 370,000 times in 7 days on the AirNZ Youtube channel alone.

Rebecca Black it is not, in so much as a traffic and buzz generator it has probably suffered from the Rebecca Black juggernaut over the last week with that video clip that will not just DIE.

I think that they may have found the viral winner they were after with this new one.

It is the in flight safety video to be played prior to takeoff, and it is taking off by it's own accord.
Posted a couple of hours ago it has already been picked up by massive blog sites and is currently a trending topic on twitter worldwide. Couldn't ask for better reach than that!

Star studded, this unique video features the remarkable talents of one Mr Richard Simmons, along with a healthy smattering of local New Zealand celebs. Fantastic. This will be huge.

As always we dig deeper to get the Big Picture on what is going on with the campaign.

With Richard Simmons on board you can be sure of a fantastic blooper reel.
The marketing whizzes at .99, Air NZ's creative firm, have really thought this one through.

The only way is up! What a great campaign.

This is quite a move from the last camapign which was another viral success, mainly due to the fact that all of the actors / pretend airline staff, are nude but covered in body paint.
This carried through to the TV campaign too.

It really doesn't have the same wow factor as the #RichRolled one - do you see what they are doing there too - trying to create their own version of their RickRolled movement. Clever, very clever.

All of this is very different from the current Rico campaign, which is the international face of Air NZ at the moment at some undetermined market demographic.
What I cannot get to grips with is why they chose to use a sleazy Latino type character, is he Spanish, Portuguese, Italian? Why the accent. Surely this is just confusing in the international marketplace. Is this how potential tourists will think that New Zealanders talk?
Rico has caused quite a fuss since his inception, with some commercials being pulled for going too far.
Here is one of the earlier videos so you get a feeling for the character:

In this one as he gets intimate with the features......

This one pushes it as he asks the cabin for come over to "fock us".

So know that you are familiar with Rico, get ready to be blown as he gets down with Snoop Dogg and his "friends"??