Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals and audience. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?
When initial stay-at-home orders rolled out in the U.S., the travel industry took an immediate hit. Destinations paused their marketing campaigns and immediately shifted strategies to support local businesses and close-to-home experiences. In a period of uncertainty, we leaned into our long-held truth that travel is part of our cultural DNA. We knew our industry needed to coalesce around a message of positivity and inspiration; we innately knew a data-driven strategy would lead us to success.Travelers were still searching, planning and dreaming. By developing an industry co-op program, together we could empower travelers and travel brands to keep travel top of mind in an economically responsible manner.
The marketing goal of the recovery campaign was to inspire and rebuild demand in travel by placing paid media targeted to travelers signaling intent to travel. The primary goal was exposure (impressions) via a program utilizing existing assets (due to limited resources during recovery), with a secondary goal of ROI.
The teams rallied around a unifying concept: Where can travel take you? We developed a 6-week marketing strategy with media partners at Sojern, ADARA and Expedia, and invited key destinations to participate in a budget-efficient co-op campaign on each platform. Two tiers of investments were offered, with up to a 50% partner match for a media plan, including creative assets, a custom landing page at TravelTakesUs.com, a social media playbook, PR and reporting. Targeting included U.S. travel searchers with a HHI of $75K-plus as well as those with a high affinity to take multiple trips a year based on booking data. We also targeted those most likely to rebound and travel quickly or rather targeted “invested travelers” who had continued to search and book.
Media included CTV such as Hulu and Roku, in-platform displays and Instagram Stories with maximum exposure to audiences consuming digital media at unprecedented levels as they sheltered at home.
Results: Which of your original goals did you achieve and how? How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign? Entrants should provide quantifiable results of their tactics or campaigns. (for example, click through rates or ad equivalency)
The media effectiveness was measured via targeted exposure and signals of intent by tracking impressions, clicks, video videos, Expedia page engagements, outbound partner referrals, and production reporting from Expedia and ADARA with associated economic impact.
Results included
9.92 ROI
$2,229,110 total revenue
70,000 homepage views
16,453 hotel rooms booked
7,322 flights booked
30,165,799 impressions
The 6-week campaign exceeded expectations in all points of the purchasing funnel. The total
campaign investment resulted in a 9.92 ROI; out of 20,228 hotel searches and
12,666 flight searches, we saw 16,453 hotel room nights booked and 7,322 flights booked. The
TravelTakesUs.com landing page received nearly 70,000 homepage views, with 1,643 partner
content views.
Our PR efforts generated an additional 1.5 million impressions in earned media exposure
within a week of launch, with coverage in travel trade publications such as MediaPost,
PhocusWire, TravelPulse and Hospitality Net.
Entry Title
MMGY National Co-Op for Recovery
Division
Recovery Strategies - Recovery Strategies