Frontier Airlines turned John Leonard's attempt to earn a free jet into a redemption for the masses - giving millions of miles away for free.
In 1996, Pepsi had a loyalty promotion that allowed people to redeem points to get various items. One of these was a jet for 7,000,000 points. John Leonard discovered that you could purchase these points for only 10 cents each, which at $700,000 would be a great sale on the $37.4 million the jet was valued at. Pepsi declined, and ultimately, the courts decided against John.
Without a jet, John ended up getting a Netflix docuseries about 26 years later. We felt that wasn't enough, and John needed more. Frontier Airlines thought the same too, and decided to give back to their customers at the same time.
BarkleyOKRP teamed up with Frontier Airlines for a campaign in February 2026, lining up with the Big Game. The campaign had an extremely short turnaround and extremely high expectations. This campaign gave Frontier customers a short window to claim free miles. There were many pieces of this campaign that fell on our web team that really exemplify the work that we delivered.
We had multiple front-end developers on the project, which required an easy way to manage deployments without much learning friction, so I implemented a deployment process through our GitHub repository, building on very little previous foundation that we had in place, allowing both staging and multiple production deployments.
Frontier's IT team was unable to host the site, and our internal IT team was unable to due to time constraints and a shifting of process. This involved me building on a previous relationship I built up with Akamai to become a "shadow IT" department consisting solely of myself. This involved server management, load-balancing, system monitoring, legal contract drafting (thanks for the help, Scott!), and much more.
The core marketing team within BarkleyOKRP were changing needs, copy, and requirements even post-launch of the site. Through a simple internal dashboard (to adjust the mile countdown and turn the redemption on/off) and the systems built, we had no problems with the technical delivery, and the campaign was a huge success for the client.