Eva Air Turns Christmas Into a Homecoming With Chasing a Plane
Eva Air's "Chasing a Plane" is a December 2017 Christmas film produced in Taiwan by agency WebGene that repositions air travel as an enabler of family reunion, using the image of a boy pursuing a departing aircraft to convey the emotional pull of returning home during the holiday season.
Released under the full Mandarin title EVA AIR 長榮航空 - Chasing the Plane 追飛機的男孩, the campaign was published in Traditional Chinese and directed squarely at Taiwan's travel-conscious consumer base, according to Admin Taiwan Net Tw. Its stated purpose was seasonal — wishing audiences a Merry Christmas and a joyful Holiday Season — but its strategic ambition reached further. Rather than promoting routes, fares, or schedules, the film asked a single human question at its core: how long has it been since you last went home to see your family? That question, posed without abstraction, grounded the brand in lived emotional experience rather than transactional utility, according to Hurun.
In the Taiwan market, where outbound travel and family-centred festivals carry deep cultural weight, the campaign's timing in December 2017年 was deliberate. Eva Air (長榮航空) framed itself not as a carrier moving bodies between points on a map, but as a companion that travels with passengers toward the people who matter most. The tagline embedded in the campaign's social description — 不論愛在哪，長榮航空就陪你飛到哪, meaning wherever love is, EVA Air will fly you there — crystallised that positioning. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 63 out of 100, reflecting competent emotional craft within a category where the reunion narrative, while resonant, is a well-worn creative territory, according to Researchandmarkets.
Eva Air identified a universal but locally potent consumer truth. Holiday travel is motivated by emotion, not logistics, and in Taiwan that truth carries particular cultural force given the centrality of family in Confucian-influenced social values. The 2017年 campaign leaned into the anxiety of distance — the feeling of having been away too long — rather than the pleasure of the destination, inverting the conventional travel advertising frame, according to Euromonitor.
The global aviation context in 2017 made this an opportune moment for emotional brand-building. According to IATA, global airline industry revenue reached US$743 billion in 2017, with year-over-year passenger volume growth of 7.4 percent. Asia-Pacific airlines carried approximately 34 percent of global passenger volumes that year, according to IATA, underscoring the region's centrality to industry expansion. Full-year revenue passenger-kilometre growth reached 7.6 percent in 2017, well above the long-term average of approximately 5.5 percent, also per IATA. Within that rising tide, airlines competing for loyalty in the Taiwan market faced the challenge of differentiation on something other than price or network reach.
Competitors such as China Airlines, Taiwan's other major full-service carrier, and regional challengers including Cathay Pacific, regularly contest the same emotionally resonant festive advertising territory. By commissioning WebGene to produce a narrative film rather than a promotional spot, Eva Air signalled a preference for brand depth over campaign reach. The strategy accepted a narrower immediate commercial message in exchange for stronger associative equity — linking the Eva Air name to warmth, care, and the irreplaceable value of being present with loved ones during the Christmas and holiday period.
WebGene constructed "Chasing a Plane" around a single, uncluttered visual metaphor. A boy chases a plane. The image is kinetic and innocent, carrying both literal meaning — a child running after an aircraft — and emotional resonance, the urgency of wanting to close distance between oneself and someone loved. That economy of idea is the campaign's primary creative strength.
The film deploys a narrative-driven structure common to holiday advertising in East Asian markets, where longer-form storytelling, often running well beyond the thirty-second convention of broadcast spots, is accepted and even expected by audiences seeking seasonal emotional content. The choice of Traditional Chinese language throughout reinforced the campaign's cultural specificity, making it a piece of communication designed for Taiwan rather than adapted from a global template. The hashtag strategy embedded in the original social release — including 最好的禮物是與最愛的人團聚, meaning the best gift is reuniting with those you love — further amplified the emotional proposition in a register native to Taiwanese social media audiences.
Production credits for "Chasing a Plane" are not publicly documented beyond the agency attribution to WebGene. The visual grammar of the film, judged from its archive record, draws on the same warm, golden-toned aesthetic that characterises much high-sentiment holiday production work from this period — a deliberate softness of light that signals safety, home, and belonging. Eva Air's brand identity, including its long-running Sanrio Hello Kitty partnership that began in October 2005 with the first Hello Kitty aircraft, an Airbus A330-200, according to World Airline News, established a precedent for the airline presenting itself through warmth and character rather than engineering or efficiency. "Chasing a Plane" sits inside that same brand personality, translating it from aircraft livery into emotional filmmaking.
Eva Air's "Chasing a Plane" accumulated 816,616 views, 324 likes, and 25 comments on its platform record, as documented in the campaign archive. The view count represents meaningful organic reach for a brand film without confirmed paid amplification behind it, suggesting the content found genuine audience appetite within Taiwan and potentially among the Taiwanese diaspora internationally. The engagement ratio — relatively modest likes and comments relative to view volume — is consistent with the behaviour of emotional brand films that are watched but not necessarily shared or reacted to publicly, a pattern common to content that resonates privately rather than virally.
No verified award wins for "Chasing a Plane" were identified across Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, or Clio Awards. No verified coverage was identified in Campaign magazine, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious. The absence of trade-press documentation is not unusual for a market-specific, language-specific holiday film from Taiwan in 2017年, a period before Mandarin-language Asian advertising campaigns routinely entered Anglophone industry discourse.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on its clarity of emotional purpose rather than creative novelty. It executes the reunion narrative with discipline and cultural specificity, and it anchors the Eva Air (長榮航空) brand to a human value — the desire to be with family — that outlasts any single festive season. For a carrier operating in a competitive Taiwan travel market, that associative positioning carries durable strategic value even where quantified commercial impact is not publicly available.
"Chasing a Plane" is a December 2017 Christmas film by Eva Air, created in Taiwan by agency WebGene. It centres on a boy pursuing a departing aircraft as a metaphor for the emotional desire to reunite with family during the holiday season, positioning Eva Air as a facilitator of meaningful human connection rather than a functional transport service.
WebGene, a Taiwan-based advertising agency, created "Chasing a Plane" for Eva Air. The campaign was released in December 2017 and produced in Traditional Chinese for the Taiwan market. Individual director or creative director credits are not publicly documented for this production.
The campaign archive records 816,616 views for "Chasing a Plane," alongside 324 likes and 25 comments. This view total reflects substantial organic reach for a brand film in the Taiwan market, consistent with audience appetite for emotionally driven holiday content from regional airlines during the 2017 festive season.
No verified award wins for "Chasing a Plane" have been identified across Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, or the Clio Awards. The campaign's absence from major Anglophone award circuit records is consistent with the limited international trade-press coverage of Mandarin-language Taiwan market films from the 2017年 period.
Eva Air used "Chasing a Plane" to shift its brand positioning from functional carrier to emotional companion, asking Taiwanese consumers how long they had been away from family. The strategy responded to a cultural truth in Taiwan that holiday travel is emotion-led, targeting reunion motivation rather than promotional price or network messaging during the Christmas season.
"Chasing a Plane" extends Eva Air's established tradition of warm, character-driven brand expression. The airline's Hello Kitty partnership, which began with its first Hello Kitty aircraft in October 2005 according to World Airline News, set a precedent for presenting the 長榮航空 brand through emotion and personality. The 2017 Christmas film translates that same brand warmth into narrative filmmaking.
.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
.jpg&w=256&q=75)
