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Flight Centre

Returning to the skies and the front of customers’ minds

The travel industry was one of, if not the hardest hit industry due to the pandemic. For almost two years, Flight Centre had paused marketing and like many other companies, was forced into scaling back operations during a very challenging time.

Towards the end of 2021 with travel restrictions being relaxed, they set out on a mission to start putting Flight Centre back at the forefront of consumers’ minds for the new year. We needed to drive booking enquiries on site through a full mix of offline and online media channels. Whilst budgets prevented traditional TV activity, it did allow for the opportunity to build and measure ad recall, awareness and consideration on YouTube, a previously untested channel for the brand.

What we did

Our target audience was defined as time poor, affluent 30–60 year olds. Research also indicated that our audience paid more attention to online video ads and spent a large amount of time online, indexing particularly highly on YouTube, making it a sound proxy to TV advertising in terms of reach capabilities.

What we did

While achieving strong reach is relatively straight forward, a key concern was wasted impressions against children watching on Parents’ YouTube accounts. We employed preventative procedures in our DSPs to avoid this and measure quality and effectiveness of delivery to fully gauge the campaign’s success.

What we did

To build recall, awareness, and consideration, we used YouTube and its ability to deliver across CTV devices and placements to mimic the high impact nature of linear TV. We utilised Google’s in-market and affinity targeting, category inclusions and exclusions, and whitelisted technology to ensure brand safety. We then measured the uplift of activity using YouTube’s brand lift studies alongside standard metrics of Completed Video Views, View Through Rate % and engagement metrics such as CTR and page lands to assess the effectiveness of delivery.

What we did

Using a mixture of creative messages, lengths, and skippable/non-skippable formats, we optimised towards the best performing to ensure delivery towards lines with the best balance of engagement, reach and cost efficiency metrics.

With activity starting in late December, early 2022 results have been very promising. YouTube activity to date has delivered a VCR of 77% at a CPCV of well under £0.01, which saw us reach well over 5 million unique individuals in our target audience.

The effectiveness of reaching our target audience was further highlighted by the results of our brand lift studies; We saw an absolute lift of 5.9% in ad recall between the control and exposed survey responders, with a cost-per-lifted user of £0.13.

For Awareness, we saw an absolute lift of 3.8% and a cost-per-lifted user of £0.21 with Google estimating, that with the delivery we achieved, over 456,000 users saw their awareness of Flight Centre lifted as a result of seeing our messaging.

Flight Centre were most keen to know the impact YouTube had on user’s Consideration to book with the travel agency. This peaked at 2.2% absolute lift, which is a really encouraging result from a standing start and bodes well for continued success for Flight Centre through the year.

  • 77%

    VCR

  • 5m

    Unique individuals reached in our target audience

  • 5.9%

    Lift in ad recall

Our work

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