Cathay Pacific Finds Wonder at Home With TillWeFlyAgain
Cathay Pacific's #TillWeFlyAgain campaign is a digital user-generated content initiative launched in China on 22 April 2020, created by Leo Burnett Hong Kong, that invited grounded travellers to recreate famous world destinations from inside their homes and share their interpretations for a chance to win 12,000 Asia Miles.
The campaign arrived at a moment when the global travel and transport industry had effectively stopped. In China, as across the world, lockdown measures had severed the routine of international movement that Cathay Pacific's entire commercial identity depends upon. Rather than retreat into silence, the airline chose to hold space for the emotional relationship between travellers and the world's wonders. The campaign's tagline — "#TillWeFlyAgain, let your imagination take flight. Find wonders of the world in every corner, from the comforts of home" — frames the brand not as a grounded aircraft but as a continuing facilitator of curiosity and possibility.
The mechanic was deliberately participatory. Audiences were encouraged to find visual echoes of iconic global landmarks within their domestic surroundings, photograph or film those interpretations, and submit them under the campaign hashtag. This user-generated structure transformed passive followers into active creative contributors, sustaining a sense of community and shared anticipation across the Chinese market and beyond. As documented by Cresta Awards, the campaign was ultimately adapted across 16 markets, giving a campaign rooted in China's lockdown experience a genuinely international footprint. The campaign's bilingual expression — running in Traditional Chinese as 盼一起再飛 alongside its English identity — signals how precisely it was calibrated to resonate within Chinese-speaking audiences while remaining portable across the wider Asia-Pacific region that Cathay Pacific serves.
Cathay Pacific entered 2020 as one of the world's most recognised carriers serving the China and Asia-Pacific corridor, operating under the creative stewardship of Leo Burnett Hong Kong following Publicis Groupe's appointment to handle the airline's creative and media responsibilities in August 2018, as reported by Marketing Interactive. That appointment had ended approximately 25 years of work with McCann Worldgroup, with Leo Burnett taking the creative brief, Digitas and Publicis Media handling media, and MSL Hong Kong managing public relations and social media, according to Marketing Interactive.
The strategic backdrop against which #TillWeFlyAgain launched was severe. The global airline market was valued at approximately US$332.6 billion in 2020, sharply below pre-pandemic expectations, according to GlobeNewswire. Domestic passenger volume declined approximately 54.7 percent year-on-year globally, falling from 5.304 billion in 2019 to 2.401 billion in 2020, according to ResearchDive. In China and across the broader travel market, consumers were not simply grounded — they were uncertain about when, or whether, flight would resume at scale.
Within this environment, Cathay Pacific's decision to run a campaign oriented around imagination rather than product represents a deliberate brand-equity play. Competitors such as Singapore Airlines and Qantas also moved toward empathy-led communication during the period, but Cathay Pacific's UGC mechanic is distinctive in asking audiences to perform the brand's promise rather than simply receive it. The campaign builds directly on the airline's earlier "Move Beyond" platform, launched in 2019 and replacing the "Life Well Travelled" positioning of 2017, as documented by The Creatives Room, reinforcing a consistent brand architecture oriented around personal enrichment through travel. For MSL Hong Kong, managing earned and social amplification of a UGC campaign during a period of peak social media usage among homebound Chinese audiences represented a structurally sound communications brief.
Carol Lam served as Chief Creative Officer on #TillWeFlyAgain at Leo Burnett Hong Kong, with Christopher Lee as Group Creative Director and Francis Wong as Associate Creative Director, according to credits documented at The Creatives Room and Cresta Awards. Angie Wong held the role of Managing Partner at Leo Burnett Hong Kong on the campaign, with MSL Hong Kong serving as the public relations and social media partner responsible for community management and earned amplification.
The creative approach is rooted in a single, transferable insight: that the visual language of travel — the arc of a window frame, the colours of a tiled floor, the light falling through a curtain — exists in ordinary domestic spaces for those willing to look. The campaign did not ask audiences to consume content about beautiful destinations; it invited them to produce content that reframed their immediate surroundings as destinations in their own right. This inversion of the traditional airline advertising model — which almost universally centres on the glamour of arrival — is what gives #TillWeFlyAgain its creative specificity.
The digital medium was not a default choice but a strategic one. With Chinese consumers spending significantly more time on social platforms during lockdown, a campaign built around image sharing and hashtag participation could generate organic reach in a way that broadcast formats could not replicate in that context. The bilingual execution, delivering the campaign identity in both English and Traditional Chinese, reflects Leo Burnett Hong Kong's understanding of the dual-register nature of Cathay Pacific's brand communication — internationally legible but locally inflected. The campaign launched as a single primary media asset supported by the participatory UGC layer, a structure that relies on creative clarity at the seed level to generate coherent community expression at scale.
The #TillWeFlyAgain campaign generated more than 10 million social impressions, 560,000 social views, and more than 100,000 positive social engagements, according to Cresta Awards and Adsspot. The campaign was recognised as a Finalist in the Social — Best Use of Instagram category at the Cresta Awards 2020, as confirmed by Cresta Awards, representing one of the more selective creative benchmarks in the region for digital social work. The campaign recorded 45,179 views and 665 likes on its primary submitted asset, as documented by Clapboard.
These figures carry structural weight. A campaign launched in China during the acute phase of a global transport industry shutdown, with no product to sell in the conventional sense, achieving more than 10 million impressions signals that the emotional proposition landed with reach. The 16-market adaptation documented by Cresta Awards and Adsspot indicates that the creative platform was sufficiently robust to travel across cultural contexts without losing coherence — a meaningful test for any campaign originating in the China and Hong Kong market.
No independent third-party brand tracking data for #TillWeFlyAgain is publicly available at the time of writing. What the structural evidence suggests is that the campaign succeeded primarily as a brand-equity and community-maintenance exercise rather than a conversion vehicle, which was the only honest brief available to any airline in April 2020. The Clapboard Score for #TillWeFlyAgain is 67 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes its emotional strategy with clarity and cultural attentiveness while operating within the inherent constraints of a UGC format during a period of extreme category disruption.
Cathay Pacific's #TillWeFlyAgain is a digital user-generated content campaign launched in China on 22 April 2020 by Leo Burnett Hong Kong. It invited grounded travellers to recreate famous world destinations from home and share images for a chance to win 12,000 Asia Miles, sustaining emotional connection with the brand during lockdown.
Leo Burnett Hong Kong created #TillWeFlyAgain for Cathay Pacific. Carol Lam served as Chief Creative Officer, Christopher Lee as Group Creative Director, and Francis Wong as Associate Creative Director, according to Cresta Awards credits. MSL Hong Kong managed public relations and social media amplification across the campaign's 16-market rollout.
#TillWeFlyAgain generated more than 10 million social impressions and over 100,000 positive social engagements, according to Cresta Awards and Adsspot. The campaign also recorded 560,000 social views. It was recognised as a Finalist in the Social — Best Use of Instagram category at the Cresta Awards 2020, confirming its competitive creative standing.
Cathay Pacific launched #TillWeFlyAgain to maintain its emotional relationship with travellers at a time when the transport industry had effectively paused. With the global airline market severely contracted in 2020, according to GlobeNewswire, sustaining brand relevance and community connection was the most commercially rational objective available to any carrier.
#TillWeFlyAgain was adapted across 16 markets beyond its China origin, according to Cresta Awards and Adsspot. The campaign ran in both English and Traditional Chinese, as 盼一起再飛, reflecting Cathay Pacific's dual-register brand communication strategy and the airline's operational footprint across the Asia-Pacific region and international routes.
The Clapboard Score for Cathay Pacific's #TillWeFlyAgain campaign is 67 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign that communicates its emotional strategy clearly and with cultural attentiveness, while acknowledging the inherent limitations of a user-generated content format operating under the constraints of the 2020 global transport industry shutdown.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
