"Back to Kai Tak," the Outdoor Lotus Grande winner for Events, Guerrilla Marketing and Stunts, was created by Leo Hong Kong for Cathay. The campaign was also a Finalist in Brand Experience Lotus.
Cathay has served Hong Kong for eighty years. That length of history has given the airline a place in local memory few brands occupy, and much of it belongs to a single location.
Hong Kong's airport for most of the twentieth century was Kai Tak. It sat on Kowloon Bay in a bowl of hills and dense residential blocks. Aircraft arriving on Runway 13 completed a forty-seven-degree turn below five hundred feet before touching down. The turn brought them within metres of apartment buildings. Pilots regarded the approach as a test of manual flying. Residents watched aircraft cross above their rooftops several times an hour. Photographers travelled from other countries to record it.
Kai Tak closed in 1998 when operations transferred to Chek Lap Kok. No aircraft has flown that approach since. What remained were photographs and the recollections of people who witnessed the legendary low-altitude approach.
Kai Tak Stadium opened in 2025 on the ground where the runway had been. Cathay is title sponsor of the Cathay/HSBC Hong Kong Sevens, the international rugby tournament that ranks among the city's largest annual events, and the tournament moved to the new stadium for its first edition there. Cathay had begun operations at Kai Tak in the 1940s, and the airline was coming full circle to the place where it started.
With government approval, a Cathay A350 flew the legendary low-altitude route across Victoria Harbour, following the path the old approach had flown over the city decades earlier. Thirty thousand spectators inside the stadium watched a live broadcast while the pilots described the approach in real-time.
Official photographs and social footage were released within twenty-four hours. Both circulated widely without paid distribution. A documentary produced around the flight recorded nine million views in a city of approximately seven million people. Residents old enough to remember the original landings recognised what they were seeing. Those too young to have seen them encountered a part of the city's history that had previously existed only in description.
Outdoor Lotus, in the Events, Guerrilla Marketing and Stunts category, rewards work that produces a public moment in physical space rather than a representation of one. This was a real flight. A Cathay aircraft passed over Hong Kong on a Sunday afternoon and people watched it from the stadium, from the street and online.
Cathay recorded more positive sentiment in Hong Kong for the first time in six years. That sentiment has remained positive since. The airline drew on eighty years of shared history with the city and gave that history back in a form people could experience by bringing it back to where it all began.
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