Qantas launches new ‘Feels Like Home’ brand campaign via Lawrence Creative Strategy
Further to the exclusive CB story on Monday, Qantas has unveiled its new brand campaign via Lawrence Creative Strategy, based on a concept of what the national carrier has been doing for almost 100 years – bringing people home.
The ‘Feels Like Home’ series tells the real stories of five Qantas passengers and their journey home to Australia being welcomed at the airport by loved ones.
Filmed in London, Santiago, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, the Pilbara and Sydney, the series features Qantas employees as well as customers and will roll out from this Sunday 9 November.
Lawrence Creative Strategy was awarded the project earlier this year but a Qantas spokesperson stressed that agency of record Droga5 would continue in that role.
Qantas Group CEO Alan Joyce said the campaign was designed to celebrate the unique place Qantas has in the lives of many Australians.
Says Joyce: “For almost 100 years Qantas has been bringing Australians from all around the world home to the people and places they love.
“We often hear that seeing the Qantas red tail at an airport, or stepping on board a Qantas aircraft, makes Australians feel like they’re halfway home already. That’s the spirit we wanted to capture.
“The stories we’re telling through this 
campaign are repeated everyday across our network. They reflect the special pull of home, the love of family and friends and the way Qantas helps bring Australians together around the country and around the globe.”
A young woman making an emotional return to Sydney after a year in London; a miner coming home to his family after a long stint in the Pilbara; a little girl coming home from Los Angeles after the trip of her lifetime visiting extended family; a mother living in Hong Kong bringing their new baby home to excited grandparents for the first time; and a young backpacker making his way back from South America. These are the real journeys and real Qantas customers at the centre of ‘Feels Like Home’.
The homecoming stories are told against the musical backdrop of Randy Newman’s song, 
Feels Like Home sung by 20 year old Australian singer, Martha Marlow. As well as the musical backdrop for the commercials, the song will be played on-board Qantas aircraft.
The Feels Like Home campaign will be seen on television, cinema, outdoor, in print and online.
In launching the campaign, Joyce said now was the right time to invest in reinforcing what makes Qantas special.
Says Joyce: “This campaign celebrates the hard work of our people, the trust and loyalty of our customers and the pride we all feel in the national carrier.”
Creative Agency: Lawrence Creative Strategy
Executive Creative Director & Copywriter: Neil Lawrence
Creative Directors: Chris Mitchell, Geoff 
Corbett
Client Service Directors: Tanya Jones, Fleur Marks
Agency Producer: George Saada
Production: Exit Films
Director: Mark Malloy
Producer: Martin Box
DOP: Chayse Irwin
Editors: The Editors: Stewart Reeves, Peter Barton, David Whittaker
Post Production: Alt VFX
Colourist: Ben Eagleton
Music: Mark Rivett, Ramesh Sathiah @ Song Zu
Composer: Randy Newman
Vocal Artist: Martha Marlow
66 Comments
But is there a version where people actually enjoy travelling?
Depressing…
So why didn’t they go with Droga5?
Wow. 7 months in the making!!
Nice spot by the way.
Location, location, location, sleepy girl in taxi, OOOOH! TAILFIN! I FEEL LIKE I’M HOME NOW!
Geez there are some bitter little pricks in this industry.
Nice insight – you certainly feel a pang of homesickness when you see a Qantas plane/logo when in an airport abroad.
If I got to make something this I’d be stoked. Nice work. Well done.
Great Work, wish I’d made it…Well done
i like it a lot.
The simple truth is Qantas don’t own coming home anymore because other airlines do it a lot better and cheaper. And these pretty-on-th-eye run-of-the-mill cliches ain’t going to fix it.
Feels like a coma to me
Best ad I’ve seen in ages. Well done.
Beautiful. Will look amazing in the cinema.
Lawrence Creative Strategy usually produce good ideas. This one… not so much. Maybe it’s brilliance is in its mediocrity. I dunno. Feels like something I’d see in an Award School folio.
This is a beautifully made, emotive spot with fantastic performances and imagery. As a TVC producer I wish I had been involved. I really can’t understand people bagging it. Well done to everyone involved.
This is a beautifully made, emotive spot with fantastic performances and imagery. As a TVC producer I wish I had been involved. I really can’t understand people bagging it. Well done to everyone involved.
i think the cut down will be much better
Heroing the moment that a traveller reunites with their family is a mistake. Any airline can bring you home to your family but only Qantas can remind you of home before you even get on the plane. Feels like they just got carried away with trying to make something beautiful. Don’t think this will last long.
Get back to re submitting your award folio for next year and the online blog shit you are writing this afternoon.
@Nice not only are there some bitter little pricks there are also some with little judgement who like old fashioned cliché ridden work from when they used to have a job.
This is awful and mawkish. Qantas may have owned ‘home’ when they delivered Iain McKenzie’s beautifully shot ‘Choir’ campaign…..but this is poor fare by comparison. It’s wallpaper and doesn’t tell me what it is about Qantas that makes it ‘Home’….maybe that’s because the terrible truth they are trying to hide is that the customer experience is so poor these days.The service, the food, the seats, the crew….Qantas lags behind so many other airlines that they have had to resort to emotion. It feels like an 80’s Maccas ad to me ,only again not as well done.
Qantas, this is cynical, emotionally-manipulative marketing. I don’t like you for that.
I suspect it also celebrates the wrong end of the journey – aren’t you talking to all the people who haven’t left yet? There’s a reason your most successful competitor consistently celebrates the destination.
Sorry, I really wanted to like this, but I just don’t.
It feels like you’ve spent 7 months putting lipstick on a kangaroo.
Very nicely done
It’s no different from any other airline spot, and more to the point QF’ s past campaigns-, swap the track to ‘I still call Australia home’ and , ermm, the same.
For someone that’s heard ‘Still Call Australia Home’ more time’s than Peter Allan… I like it. Ticks all the boxes for me; just wish Randy Newman was Australian. That being said it’s a great re-imagining / arrangement of the song.
Well directed. Nice grade. Good natural performances and casting.
It’s lucky you agency blokes can hire talented directors and production to make you look good.
The script and idea is pretty nothing here, lets be honest.
Great spot. Congrats to all involved
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDZUfGBUSeY
You’ll be hearing from my lawyers.
I so wanted this to be a great campaign, to help get Qantas back on the map. But I am very disappointed. Nicely shot and all that, but tone and manner I find dark instead of uplifting, it’s very generic; it could be for any airline, nothing that warms me to it at all. And I can’t help feeling that Qantas has been disloyal, yet again to their partner/agency – yet they expect loyalty from me (I don’t work for D5 or any of their previous agencies).
I was a Qantas devotee for 30 years, but they give me very little reason to stay with them these days, I can get: better service, better entertainment, better seating layout, better food, more reliability from Emirates, and other airlines, at a cheaper price. Their new advertising doesn’t trip any old emotions in me to return – it could be for any airline. Sorry Qantas, but you’ve lost for good, a once very devoted customer.
Apart from the production values,casting and musiic the idea is very average.
I like this spot. It made me rather emotional. Even the second time. The music is lovely, the performances are great and it nails the homecoming. Won’t make me fly Qantas any more than I do now, but I still really like the ad.
But I grounded the god damn fleet… how did these buggers get home?
It’s just pretty photography. Sentimental. Shallow. Boring. What a let down. Great work though DOP Chayse Irwin.
I’d love to “Come Home” on Qantas but I live in Perth and Qantas doesn’t fly internationally in or out of Perth – so basically this ad is just rubbing this fact in my nose!
How the fuck did this slip through to the keeper?
This is got the wrong kind of emotion. It’s sooo dark.
Makes me feel not happy at all.
I like the strategy – in a kind of get back to something we own way but this strategy won’t take them anywhere new.
It feels like Qantas need to be a bit more subtle and a bit more positive.
Stop bitching about the spot and look at the big picture, ladies. Is it good, is it bad, is it whatever? The real story, which has been totally skimmed over, is how Neil Lawrence got the gig for this. It’s a huge coup. I take my hat off to him for penetrating the impenetrable. Have any of you ever worked on the Qantas business? …I thought not. Whatever you think of the spot, and I’m deliberately not commenting on it because that’s not important right now, it would be intriguing to unpick the behind-the-scenes politics. How did he pick up this ‘one-off’ assignment? A bit of journalism, CB?
andy keep crafting the very important dm, blog, retail shit you are working on and by the way learn to spell, tool.
When will the team at Qantas stop floundering and get back to I Still Call Australia Home? Mojo, Droga, Big Red and now Neil Lawrence all falling desperately short. Sure this spot is beautifully produced and there is a genuine insight behind the work, but it lacks the emotional gravitas that only an ISCAH campaign can deliver.
If this is a pure brand play, then it’s a no brainer to get back to the winning formula. Just tweak the execution so it feels fresh and watch the brand health metrics head skyward.
No wonder they are going bust. Should save the money and reduce airfare prices.
Looks great. Nice track. Top performances but nothing new. No risk – no reward.
Feels like BA 20years ago. Maybe that’s what people want. What would I know?
I’ve got banners to build.
Old CD Guy is on the money with his post…how did this slip through?
To all the muppets and banner builders go back 300x250px world this is a massive move on from the last rubbish that was done with drones pretending they were planes set to a dreary Daniel Johns track…no wonder that agency was boned.
I think this is really bland and dated. It’s depressing and has no real idea. The pictures are nice but lack any real story telling and the ending is so overdone.
Sorry but not my cup of tea!
Interesting there’s so little commentary in this being a failure in strategy and everyone just immediately jumps to pan the creative… a consistent problem in Australian Marketing.
The issue here is it is another Qantas campaign that fails to work in a competitive aviation market – internationally and domestically.
Is Qantas’s target audience seriously only Australian’s who are living/ spending time away from home… I think not?
If they continue to get those basics of marketing and a competitive business strategy wrong how do they ever hope to compete.
Why didn’t this work start with a decent analysis of audience, potential audience and where future growth for Qantas will come from…
big marketing fail in my opinion, no wonder the resulting work is so blah blah!
At last our airline is back (in it’s advertising at least) to where it was was before it flew away from ‘I Still Call Australia Home.’ And good to see a couple of Mojo vets like George and Chris on board. Well done all. Top job. Don’t worry too much about the bitter and twisted critics, this will bring some of the Qantas drifters and doubters back to the flying kangaroo.
In answer to your question Old CD guy instead of ‘how’
Maybe it should be ‘Howe’
Just join the dots from Qantas marketing queen to Neil.
It only takes a little bit of Labor.
I’d join the dots to the guy beneath the marketing queen.
He loves helping out old ‘friends’ and isn’t averse to a round the world junket either.
‘Champagne Tim’, take a bow.
Nicely shot, but an expensive way to reaffirm the status quo. There’s not one compelling reason here to choose QANTAS over any other carrier flying the same route. If they were serious, they would have introduced a new service promise, kick-arse food, or even a playstation in every seat (feel free to use any of these ideas next time).
The song also feels very 2014, and by that, I mean it will grate upon people in a few weeks’ time (already is on me). Should have sucked it up and used ISCAH – if you’re trying to get some of the equity from 20 years ago back again, it’s a quick neural-leap to the good-old times when they were the default choice.
always the comment that people write when they don’t like what is being said.
“do back to your DM…”
I think a lot of those people have raised valid points. And if THEY have raised them then I think MOST people will raise them.
Do you like that logic?
I also would like to point out that HOME was a creative execution of The Spirit Of Australia. What it did was emphasise something great within us all, it lifted our spirits, it made us feel happy and it made us feel proud.
Note the collective use of language. Note also the happy and the proud feelings.
G’day old mate.We know each other well and I have always respected your judgement ,but on this occasion you are very wrong.
This work is generic,derivative and I am sorry to say it but moored in a time long gone.
Bringing people together is not new and neither is it an unviable territory.
But like all great campaigns it must have an idea.
‘Choir’ did and so did ‘Face’ for BA.
Unfortunately this one doesn’t.
If you can guess who I am Gawen ,the drinks are on me!
awful and depressing… A bit like Qantas itself
I think it’s a nice spot overall.
But what’s up with the stills?
I travelled home on Qantas last nite and the stills were the first images I’d seen from the campaign.
Wow, pretty freakin’ ordinary.
I know the TVC is the hero and everyone obsesses about that but FFS put some effort and production value into the stills.
Looks like they were taken by the work experience kid sneaking a peek over the director’s shoulder.
“Here- hold this and point it at whatever’s being filmed and just keep clicking this button on the top. We’ll take whatever you manage to get and use it in our national campaign.
What’s that? Grading? Composition? Lighting? Nah – it’s only stills”.
You’re trying to create images that sell the emotion here guys.
And it ain’t workin’
This part of the production is obviously under-resourced and is letting the campaign down.
Stills look real to me. But I don’t have a guide dog.
Coma inducing.
Nice jolly though.
I worked on this business about 20 years ago. I presented a spot which had many of the same initial elements – the bits where people are making their way to the Qantas plane to fly home to Australia. But then I inserted an IDEA: As people walk through the door into the plane, the interior of the plane is NOT a plane – it’s somewhere in Australia already. Not bad, eh? Very campaignable. Of course it was never approved….
…because it’s a crap idea.
Looks great. But I agree you should have used “I still call Australia Home” as the track – seems like a no-brainer. Do we really need another mawkish, warbly ‘indie-folk’ track on a commercial?
http://creativity-online.com/work/british-airways-the-welcome-of-home/37823
@ Strategy I’m with you.
Overall I don’t mind the spot, it’s not offensive (nor is it original) but it’s obviously bang on strategy and it’s exactly what Qantas wanted. It seams like they are to scared to do something original and ground breaking and just want to dictate. Hence not using D5 for this.
But… and a Kardashian sized but at that…
What the …. is up with the Print component, talk about an after thought!
The stills are embarrassingly bad.
They have zero depth or emotion, below average work and are nothing but a missed opportunity.
Especially when you consider they were created to support a very cinematic and beautifully shot piece of film.
Seriously, It’s a nice spot. Beautifully shot spot with nice nostalgia. Haters are always gonna hate.
Sure, there isn’t a big creative idea, but it’s more strategic.
And for those people questioning the ‘depressing’ elements – it’s done for contrast so that the homecoming feels more positive. Which is a great part of travelling and what Qantas is trying to own as an Australian airline.
I’m a big fan of this new campaign. I love the song and the singer. Lets just hope the airline can live up this new campaign.
Thank you so much for bringing my nephew Bryon home from Darwin for Christmas it has made our family so happy
Whenever I see the one with the little girl returning home from Los Angeles, I can’t help but feel sorry for the adult male who would have been moved to another seat as soon as she boarded and sat down next to him.
In the past I could relate to this add and truly were very happy to see the Qantas plane pulling in. BUT now being banged onto an Emirates plane surely does not feel like home and I actually feet a bit sold out. False advertising from my experience
I hated the ad where they show an Asian woman and a white man. Why not a white woman and an Asian man?? I’m sick of the sexist, demeaning depiction of women in advertising, typically here representing the powerful businessman as white Anglo Saxon and the woman as compliant Asian.
Last time I travelled was first class, not on Qantas but on Etihad. I paid for it all myself. I am a white middle aged Australian WOMAN and would love to see women like me represented with Asian or other ethnic husbands for a change. I’m sick of the racist sexism. Oh, and my ticket cost me $10,000 plus, and I have have the bucks and I travel at least twice a year, always first class. Hey, Qantas! News flash! It’s the 21st Century!!!
Did anyone else find that ad completely confusing? I felt like we were in Asia for the duration of advertisement. Strange choice of ad for an Australian airline.