NATS

  • Luke Thompson
How does a business go from flying under the radar to a high profile, engaging brand that’s setting standards?

The journey was a long haul one, with plenty of small steps and projects throughout – all of which were centred around the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) story.

NATS is indispensable yet invisible – and our job was to make their story known. After all, who hasn’t wondered about the people who control our skies?

The power of storytelling was at the heart it all. From their branding and website design, to creating apps and helping them set up a content publishing process, we’ve been focused on our flight path: to take the brand’s story to the world.

Digital, visual, interactive… NATS went beyond the traditional to get the message across. We created visually stunning infographics, engaging videos, and installations that detailed what NATS does, and we built a couple of apps too – one as a sales tool that brings NATS’ expertise and activities to life for potential clients, and an airspace app that tracks live flights.

We even capitalised on NATS’ guest starring role on BBC’s Airport Live TV series, by developing a standalone hub and a Twitter Q&A to support the programme. And people loved it – racking up 5 million overall impressions.

We continued the conversation with a blog, populating it with NATS’ own rich content to clarify complex issues such as traffic holding and how to become a controller. It really took off: 20,000 page views per month, millions of views on the videos, and thousands of likes on social media channels.

It opened up a world of possibilities and new business opportunities. All these different projects came together to help NATS clearly articulate what it does and the benefit it brings – to both businesses and the public. As a result, NATS saw increased positive media coverage in the UK, and numerous commercial leads were generated in the UK and the Middle East.

Where to next? We’re propelling NATS onto the next big step in their journey – to set up their own content publishing team and go on a mission to discover even more incredible stories within their company. The journey has just begun.

This work was completed while at SAS/MSLGROUP