Frontier’s “East Wing It Sale”: A Monumental Marketing Mistake

The marketing wizards over at Frontier, Denver’s “hometown airline,” have been operating on a shoestring in an attempt to win the low-cost airline wars. In that economizing, it’s paralleled the efforts of many Americans who are looking at higher health insurance costs, stratospheric grocery bills, home prices through the roof in most metro areas, and an ill-advised tariff conflagration that’s thrown the whole economy into exactly what most airlines want to avoid: a tailspin.

Is that overstating things? No, not in either case. If anything, America is under-reacting to what’s been stolen from us as a nation thus far, both in terms of wealth and freedom. And based on the head-smackingly poor marketing decisions made by Frontier over the years, we’re definitely underselling its PR campaigns that have crashed and burned.

Which brings us to Frontier’s latest misstep, an innocent-enough email that recently landed in our inboxes. It seemed like the usual digital marketing push about Holiday Travel, something to seed the minds of Frontier passengers past, present and future in order to remind them to make flight reservations soon for the travel season that will soon be upon us. But the title of the email — and the accompanying photo — was strikingly weird. The “East Wing It Sale” showed a photo of the beleaguered White House, with a casual mention of “wanting to explore our nation’s monuments.” And the not-so-subtle wink in the copy below said that holiday deals, much like unapproved self-aggrandizement on the backs of American history, are “built to move fast.” That travelers can give their holiday plans a “new look.”

With the dust still settling over the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, what the hell was Frontier thinking?

Giving the marketing team that came up with this tie-in far more credit than it clearly deserves, the ad was at least provocative. But if the effect of an ad is to make potential customers suddenly aware that you are, perhaps, an airline full of dumbassery, is that a win? Linking Frontier to the unapproved and unlawful destruction of a landmark — the People’s House, remember — despite assurances from President Donald Trump that his ridiculous, gold-plated gaudy ballroom plans wouldn’t interfere with the existing edifice of the East Wing? Marketing teams generally try to distance the company for which they work as far as possible from disasters to which they have no connection. They don’t generally invoke them with a political blitheness that would make George Washington’s jaw drop so far that his slave-tooth-dentures would fall out.

There are really only two explanations here. Maybe the marketing team is indeed so fundamentally misguided that its members believe a casual mention of a still-growing national tragedy could be effectively invoked and capitalized upon, urging holiday plans to include checking out all the national monuments that are as-yet undisturbed by Trump’s massive ego and absolute disrespect for American legacy. That’s…not a great option: Better go see the Lincoln Memorial before Trump turns it into the Melania Memorial by replacing the seated Lincoln with a statue of his wife, her back turned to visitors, wearing a long coat that says “I really don’t care. Do U?” But even that’s far preferable to the alternative, which is that Frontier Airlines is coming out and making a statement that it fully supports the demolition of the East Wing, and that it, like Trump and his whole nation-pillaging family, really doesn’t care about anything but lining its own pockets.

If Trump is fiddling on the roof of the White House while America burns, is this Frontier advertising front-row seats to the nation’s demise?

Granted, Frontier Airlines is no stranger to bad decision-making — from its move to a la carte pricing, which effectively allows it to obfuscate the real price of a ticket, to doing away with the cookies that once defined its hometown market approach, to scuttling the only campaign that ever won it any fans: the animals on the tails, which mostly went away because apparently talking rabbits and bears are too pricey. Add to that Frontier’s notoriously terrible customer service and gates so far out in the boonies of Denver International Airport that they almost stretch 25 miles back to downtown Denver, and it’s no wonder that the airline feels the need to gin up some excitement through constant cute-sounding emails.

But this is not that: This ad strategy isn’t cute, and it’s not memorable for any of the right reasons. Because things are dark in America right now, and getting darker. While the last election was sadly decided by only about a third of Americans (Trump got 49 percent of the popular vote, which only 65 percent of the public turned out to participate in), his support has understandably dwindled as his promises made have become promises broken. Like any good con man, Trump said what he needed to say in order to get re-elected.

And yet Frontier casually jumps on the Trump bandwagon now stuck in the rutted mud. The government remains in shutdown, at the behest of Trump and his agenda. If Congress goes back to work, after all, those demanding the release of the Epstein Files will have their 218 votes to make it happen. In the meantime, the country is in chaos, including those air traffic controllers going unpaid while still keeping a system operating that could and probably will break down once those workers have had enough of working for no pay. As for travel, millions of American families might well skip visits to relatives this holiday season in order to save up for the incredible increases in health-care premiums. Frontier won’t have anyone to sell tickets to. No airlines will, because discretionary money will be a thing of the past. Americans will be too busy trying not to starve or get sick.

Ads are, of course, all about optics. And the optics on this are terrible, no matter the angle from which you look at the ad. Frontier has never been operated by what you might call a brain trust. It’s the last-ditch option for most fliers, and to give credit where it’s due, the airline has remained relatively successful in the marketplace by filling that underachiever need. But when an airline moves from being annoying just by nature to being deliberately offensive, that might be the beginning of the end.

Like almost all of Frontier’s decisions over the last decade or more, it’s incredibly — almost unbelievably — short-sighted. And no one wants an airline to come up short.