A PR dream or disaster? Jet2's holiday advert finds new life as joke meme

The Guardian

6 days ago

You're the boss of a travel company, it's early summer and your brand is going viral. Millions of people are watching and sharing social media clips of people on holiday, the soundtrack to which is your company jingle.
It sounds like a PR dream, but is it?
That's the question no doubt being pondered at the headquarters of Jet2 – the budget travel firm that has found itself at the centre of a runaway TikTok meme which shows the less glamorous side of British summer holidays.
The trend began as a joke: Jet2's relentlessly cheerful jingle, Jess Glynne's Hold My Hand, played over the most cheerless summer holiday footage found on social media.
Plane fights, water sports accidents and drunken disasters are all soundtracked by the theme tune as the tagline 'Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday' is announced the saccharine voiceover.
The line has become social media code for travel plans gone wrong, with users pairing the audio with clips of holiday mishaps, minor chaos and anything that falls short of the usual polished posts.
In one TikTok video with more than 1.6m likes, a woman almost drowns in waist-high water and has to be saved by a lifeguard after coming out of a water slide in Tenerife.
Another post set to the sound with 16k likes shows a man laying on a sun lounger by the pool as rain drenches him. More than 1.3m other videos have used the sound and the hashtag #nothingbeatsajet2holidays has more than 25.5k posts.
Jet2 has not commented on the trend, but the company has leaned into it on social media, posting its own clip using the same audio and launching a challenge, offering a £1,000 holiday voucher as a prize.
Zoë Lister, the voice actor who utters the now famous line, and singer Jess Glynne have both weighed in. Glynne posted a TikTok video miming the voiceover, and Lister has appeared on radio re-enacting the famed slogan.
Campaigns like Jet2's challenge show how brands are trying to meet users where they are, but doing so means learning to speak the platform's language, said Dr Andreas Schellewald, a researcher in digital culture.
'From a brand point of view, this is still tricky terrain and more tactical rather than strategic. This definitely adds great reach for the Jet2 brand – at the same time, brand marketing is not just about awareness but also resonance and reaction, for which I assume brands usually still prefer to have more control over how they are perceived publicly', he said.
The advert may have found new life as a meme, but its social media DNA was there from the start, according to Adam Gordon, a social media strategist and co-founder of the social media agency a Friendly Bunch.
'The original Jet2 TV ads were deliberately social media led – the hold my hand line was always married to an on-screen POV shot of someone holding someone's hand – a classic Instagram holiday shot – so the seeds were sown early, and deliberately.
'The irony is that the Jet2 ad was born out of the old glossy age of Instagram perfection, but this meme has dragged it into the messy imperfection of the TikTok era. A crystal clear sign of the times in the world of social media,' he added.