THE BATTLE FOR AI SEARCH STARTS BEFORE THE PROMPT, SAYS ICELANDAIR MARKETING CHIEF

Icelandair’s Director of Global Marketing, Gisli Brynjolfsson, told a World Aviation Festival webinar on 7 September that the contest for visibility in AI-powered travel search is won or lost before a traveller ever types a prompt, and that airlines need to build brands people already know, remember and feel something about if they want to be considered when customers turn to AI for travel advice. “Branding has never been as important as it is today because, at least on our side, no one really understands how AI search will develop,” he said. “Going back to the basics and truly believing that the brand is the strongest thing that you can have in your toolkit is very relevant at the moment.” For Icelandair, he argued, the priority is not to optimise for how AI tools might work but to build a distinctive brand people already recognise, competing for attention with everything else in a customer’s feed, including user-generated content, rather than simply with other airlines. “The biggest challenge today is getting attention,” he said. “You can’t just put out another destination with a price, that’s not going to cut it. You have to be way more interesting.”

BETTING ON AUTHENTICITY OVER POLISH

Brynjolfsson traced one recent campaign to a photograph of a volcanic eruption beneath the Northern Lights that prompted social media users to debate whether the image was genuine, a reaction that inspired a video campaign built around a sceptic who refuses to believe Iceland’s landscapes are real. “There’s too much fake, AI-generated content out there, and people are just becoming tired of it,” he said. “They’re craving something authentic, something that’s genuinely real, and we felt that this was a very natural space for Icelandair to play in.” The same thinking shaped Icelandair’s ‘Really Bad Photographer’ campaign, which invited people who considered themselves poor photographers to apply for the chance to shoot Iceland’s scenery, aiming to show that its landscapes do not need a professional eye to look extraordinary. Brynjolfsson said Icelandair still relies heavily on search behaviour, website activity, booking data, social listening and brand tracking to understand demand, but frames these tools as being in service of the brand rather than a substitute for it. “Technology should make marketing more human, not less,” he said. He is due to expand on Icelandair’s approach at the World Aviation Festival’s Marketing Summit in Lisbon from 13 to 15 October, an event expected to draw more than 4,500 attendees and 600 speakers.

Note: This is conference commentary rather than a product, contract or financial announcement; it is presented here as an airline marketing executive’s stated views rather than as verified fact about how any particular AI search tool works.