Eleven made an airline so boring you wanted to buy a ticket elsewhere

The flight lasted five hours and 45 minutes. The passengers were mannequins. The airline had a website, social accounts, a telephone number, even a fax number for coupons. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to build a business nobody would want to patronize.

This was BLAH Airlines, the fictional carrier Eleven created for Virgin America in 2014. Its defining product was an extravagantly dreary film of a cross-country flight. Watching it, you were invited to leave. A click could take you away from BLAH and toward Virgin America. The escape hatch was the sales pitch.

There is a pleasing commercial logic here. Virgin America wanted travelers to reconsider the familiar indignities of flying. Eleven made those indignities into a place people could visit. A small complaint - flying can be miserable - became an entire imaginary company, complete with the administrative equipment of misery.

The San Francisco agency behind it worked across branding, advertising, digital design, and media. Its client history included Apple, Google, Virgin America, Visa, and Dignity Health. It sold companies help with how they presented themselves, what they said, and where customers encountered the result. BLAH supplied an unusually funny demonstration of how those assignments could become one idea.

Eleven subsequently joined Vision7 in 2018 and merged into Mekanism under the Plus Company umbrella in 2022. Read its work today as the record of an agency whose separate brand has been folded into another business. The useful question is what survives in the work itself.

02The difficult audience was inside the agency

BLAH was built to behave badly across channels. Its social presence answered people as the fictional airline. Its website and telephone service extended the joke beyond the film. The production credits include World War Seven, a reminder that this apparently simple provocation required people who could build and sustain a peculiar world.

The resistance began surprisingly close to home. Looking back, chief creative officer Mike McKay said the hard part was getting the teams comfortable with the risk and creepiness of the undertaking. The client was not the toughest audience. “This content wasn’t exactly snackable,” he told Campaign.

That hesitation matters. A nearly six-hour commercial asks creative and production teams to defend something that sounds wrong in a planning meeting. The length would seem absurd on a media schedule. Inside the concept, it was the point: a cross-country flight takes a long time, especially on BLAH.

It also gave the viewer a choice. You could sample the joke, explore the fictional airline, or leave for the actual advertiser. The film did not require every customer to finish it. Its premise was understandable in a sentence, while its little world offered more for anyone curious enough to investigate.

“This content wasn’t exactly snackable.”Mike McKay / on BLAH Airlines

03Four years later, the clock ran the other way

For Google Cloud’s 2018 March Madness campaign, Eleven faced a different problem. Business buyers needed to understand what cloud data analysis could do. College basketball provided a public setting where a prediction could be tested against something happening in front of everyone.

Google had become the NCAA’s official public cloud provider. For the advertising project, Eleven and its collaborators built a system that could turn fresh game insights into television commercials within minutes. A toolkit of more than 250 assets supplied the visual ingredients; a Google Cloud-powered application assembled, rendered, and delivered the spots.

Production director David Evans describes the crucial early step as a prototype. Showing how the technology could work helped win the assignment. The team then had less than eight months before the Final Four. Data scientists, basketball specialists, creatives, and production partners worked through development and testing. Cloneless supplied technology; Gentleman Scholar developed the visual toolkit.

Scholar’s account reveals a less glamorous difficulty: the ingredients had to look coherent in combinations that could not be fully predetermined. Animation, computer-generated imagery, and live action needed to remain recognizably part of the same campaign. The production problem resembled designing a kitchen for a menu that would change during service.

The resulting campaign produced six prediction-based spots. Evans reports a 91 percent lift in product interest and a 42 percent increase in brand search volume. Those are campaign-team figures, rather than a promise about what another advertiser will get. The work also received Cannes recognition for creative data and digital craft.

The resource commitment is easier to understand than any tidy story about spontaneous creativity: months of preparation, reusable assets, specialist collaborators, and a broadcast deadline. Fast output depended on slow preparation. A business copying the idea needs reliable inputs and a way to approve and distribute the result while it is still relevant.

04Kindness had to leave the television

Eleven’s range is clearer when the basketball stops. In 2013, it helped Dignity Health develop “Hello humankindness,” a brand platform built around the human relationship in care. The assignment extended into the places where patients, families, and staff would actually encounter the organization.

A 2014 activation invited people to make short acts-of-kindness videos on Vine. The team worked with creators, used paid social distribution, and collected the videos on a responsive website so participation was accessible beyond the app. That last choice looks especially sensible in retrospect: a useful brand idea needs somewhere to live beyond a particular social platform.

The design firm Exit describes taking Eleven’s messaging into a program covering 38 Dignity Health campuses. It audited sites and developed signage standards and an implementation manual. Copy moved from advertising into physical environments, including messages for employees and visitors.

The practical benefit for a client is consistency. A promise introduced in a commercial can reappear at an entrance or along a walkway. That requires coordination between the people making the promise and the people responsible for the experience. An encouraging sign can support good care; it cannot substitute for it.

05A business built between disciplines

Eleven began in 1999. Its co-founders included Michael Borosky, Rob Price, and Paul Curtin, whose backgrounds crossed creative direction and design. Borosky had worked at Michael Cronan Design, Pentagram, and CKS Partners. By 2008, his professional biography described a career divided between online and offline work. That combination helps explain the agency’s comfort with assignments that spilled beyond a conventional ad.

The business model paired ongoing agency-of-record relationships with individual projects. A client could need a sustained partner across a brand or a team for a particular launch or campaign. Services covered strategy, identity, content, websites, social activity, and media. The thing being bought was the coordinated labor and judgment needed to make those pieces work together.

This placed Eleven among creative agencies able to handle substantial brand assignments. A client comparing options would weigh that breadth against a specialist design studio, a media agency, or an internal team. Eleven’s case studies make the strongest argument when the problem crosses those boundaries: a fictional airline needs copy and service design; a live commercial needs software and production.

The 2018 acquisition announcement projected revenue of $29 million for that year, following 30 percent growth, and described a team of roughly 100. These are historical figures attached to that transaction. They show the scale of the operation that attracted Vision7, rather than a current standalone revenue estimate.

There is also a concrete glimpse of its teaching culture. The Marcus Graham Project’s 2019 San Francisco bootcamp schedule included Eleven-led sessions on strategy, media, production, and experience design, alongside client work. Students encountered several disciplines inside the same organization. That is a more useful picture of integration than a list of capabilities on a pitch slide.

06The agency eventually redesigned itself

In 2021, Eleven revisited its own identity after more than two decades. Borosky described an early constraint: simply drawing a different pair of numerals would not justify the effort. The team reconsidered the negative space in its existing identity and rebuilt the mark from that starting point. Even an agency needed a reason to change its logo.

The larger change followed in 2022. Plus Company announced that Eleven and Mekanism would combine under the Mekanism brand, presenting the merger as a way to bring together talent and resources. For someone seeking the business today, Mekanism is the relevant continuation. Eleven’s history belongs in that context.

What can a smaller team borrow? Begin with a difference the customer can experience. Give it a form that makes the difference visible. Build the unglamorous parts - the website, the content system, the approval process, the sign manual - that allow the idea to survive contact with customers.

The conditions matter. BLAH needed an airline with an experience worth escaping to. Google Cloud needed functioning technology and collaborators able to meet the clock. Dignity Health needed a promise people could recognize in their encounters with care. Take away the underlying difference and the same techniques become elaborate ways of attracting attention to an ordinary offering.

Eleven’s most interesting work makes the offer tangible. Sometimes that takes a basketball prediction. Sometimes it takes a hospital sign. And sometimes it takes a cabin full of mannequins, waiting patiently for you to book another airline.