Virgin America's Neon Revolution

Mike Cessario shares how Virgin America revolutionized the airline industry through innovative design and customer experience.

"Early in my advertising career in San Francisco, I worked on the Virgin America airline account. I got super deep into Virgin and read Richard Branson's books. Their model was to find a stale category and create the one really cool, fun brand within that category, which forces the rest of the category to start adapting.

Nobody was excited to get on an airplane or eat airplane food. Virgin was the first to make planes with neon blue lighting and TVs in every seat, which is now a common thing in every airline. They would look for things that were extremely boring or categories where you couldn't think of one cool brand, but could still have appeal - just victims of poor branding and lack of innovation.

They'd identify opportunities where people would really love something, but it had been stuck in the doldrums of branding for so long that it needed something new."