Etihad Airways Digital Outdoor Campaign in Kazan and Sochi
Build awareness of Etihad Airways among affluent travelers in Kazan and Sochi through premium digital outdoor placements.
Background
Etihad Airways is the national airline of the United Arab Emirates and flies through its hub in Abu Dhabi. Moscow and St Petersburg have been regular destinations for years, but Kazan and Sochi are recent seasonal additions. The Kazan link opened on 4 December 2025, with three flights a week scheduled only to the middle of April, so by February the airline had weeks rather than months to build demand.
RMAA Agency planned and bought the digital outdoor for two cities that behave nothing alike in February. In Kazan most movement is the daily commute, and it concentrates on a handful of main roads. Sochi fills with visitors instead, and they divide between the seafront and the ski resorts in the mountains above the city. One unified plan would have missed both.
Goal
The original request covered four weeks across Kazan, Sochi and St Petersburg. What was finally signed came down to two cities and roughly two weeks, closing at the end of February, which meant the plan had to earn attention from a small set of screens rather than from breadth.
Two things made this harder than a routine outdoor buy. First, the airline had no video assets for outdoor screens and works in static formats for this market, so the material for every screen had to be built before anything could go live. Second, the client works to a documented reporting standard and asked for time stamped screenshots and video from the first day on air, so verification had to run alongside the campaign rather than follow it.
The overall success of the campaign depended on our ability to protect the volume of plays inside a closing window, get every file accepted by the operators, and prove each output with independent evidence.
Solution
Campaign execution
We chose the seven screens by geo cluster, direction of traffic and estimated daily audience, and the selection mixed two formats. The large building facades run a long advertising loop, so our spot came up a few hundred times a day, in places where traffic slows and people have time to look up. The smaller roadside screens run a short loop and carried it 1,440 times a day, which is what it takes to register on drivers passing at speed.
The final artwork was still in preparation as the buy was being signed, so we moved the start with both operators and kept the slots reserved. Kazan went live on 14 February and Sochi on 17 February. The 28 February end date would not move, so we recovered the lost days in volume rather than in dates. In Sochi we added extra airtime on one facade, and in Kazan we looped a shorter clip so that every paid slot stayed full.
Kazan, Chistopolskaya St.
Kazan, Amirkhana St.
Sochi, Krasnaya Polyana
Sochi, Primorskaya St.
Every operator sets its own rules on format, frame rate, text size and even how much white a frame may contain, so we checked every file against the spec of the screen it was going to, and the Russian copy against advertising law.
Verification and reporting
Field photographers documented every structure with the creative on screen, each file carrying a date and time watermark, and on the Sochi embankment we also took frames from street surveillance cameras. The full report, organized by address, reached the client while the campaign was still running.
Results
- Seven digital structures, four in Kazan from 14 to 28 February 2026 and three in Sochi from 17 to 28 February 2026.
- 69,300 plays in total, 50,580 of them in Kazan and 18,720 in Sochi.
- Total screen time exceeded 288 hours.
- The second airtime block in Sochi added 3,168 plays.
The February run gave Etihad Airways a compact and fully verified read on two Russian markets before it committed to anything larger. What matters most is that the airline came back for a second Sochi flight from 15 June to 14 July 2026, thirteen surfaces over thirty days, which is more than twice as long as the February run and over four times as many screens in the city.
