I just read that British Airways has cut out Richard Branson’s cameo in Casino Royale and also blurred out a Virgin Atlantic logo that appears during the movie. It’s hard not to laugh at a seemingly paranoid BA because the move is going to be reported pretty widely in the press. There’s no way that an action like this is going to win them any points.

I also don’t believe that a benign cameo and a bit of competitive product placement would adversely affect BA’s passengers’ perception of BA. They should’ve left the scenes in and ignored the thing altogether. After all, the passengers will have already bought their tickets and gotten on your plane before being exposed to anything.

The risk of negative buzz is quite a bit greater than any upside they’re going to see.

We screen all films before they’re used on our aircraft so that we can control the content of what is displayed,” the (BA) spokesman said on condition of anonymity, in line with company policy. “We have full control over what is shown.

We all know that there’s no love lost between the two, esp since Branson quite regularly goes after BA for things they shouldn’t be up to, but this seems like taking matters too far.

It rings of pettiness more than anything else and it’s certainly not something that’s going to help the BA brand perception any. Virgin comes off as being the bigger company.

Probably the best PR bit in all of this is the fact that Virgin Atlantic left BA’s scene intact when it ran Die Another Day!

Paul Charles, a spokesman for Virgin Atlantic, said was a shame BA felt the cut was necessary. He said Virgin made no changes to “Die Another Day” a Bond film featuring British Airways, adding his carrier’s policy was not to edit the movies it shows.

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