BLM Quantum | The Digital Performance Agency

Client

Fly Thomas Cook

The Challenge

FTC have built their business through direct online channels. This approach has been hugely successful in driving market share, however it does mean that people only ever come into contact with FTC when they are at the point of booking their flights, usually through search or an aggregator. Because of this, brand awareness and consideration are low and sales were only generated when flights are cheapest or at the most convenient times.

FTC were never going to be able to compete with the media spends of brands like BA, Ryanair or Easy Jet but our challenge was, with a very small budget, to drive consideration of FTC amongst 1834's and raise awareness of the destinations they fly to.

Strategy

You don't need us to tell you that for most 18-34 adults, social networks are an intrinsic part of their lives. Many suffer an unhealthy addiction to Facebook, washed down with some Myspace, Instant Messenger and maybe even some Twitter on the side.

These channels have established themselves as a key form of social contact and they're hugely relevant to us because they play a massive role in how 18-34's organise, talk about and share their holiday experiences.

Often these conversations focus around something we've termed as 'holiday gloating'. A phenomenon focused around the build up to a holiday, involving reminding people on a nearly continuous basis, when you're going on holiday, where it is and how great it'll be - much of this occurs verbally via friend and work social groups.

From this insight we developed our idea - the FTC Holiday gloating widget

Innovation

We believe that brands are not supposed to be in social networks without a good reason. So to justify their presence they need to offer a consumer benefit - we knew our idea did just that.

The FTC holiday widget gives people another opportunity to gloat by downloading the widget onto their social network profile. The widget can be personalised with essential gloating information such as holiday destination, resort weather feed, countdown clock and various templates to be personalised, such as faux consumer reviews.

But the fun doesn't stop there. When on holiday, users are able to upload comment and photos from PC or mobile onto the widget to maximise gloating potential.

Sitting pride of place on your social network homepage, it gives the consumer an opportunity to have a bit of 'holiday gloating' fun whilst also allowing the brand to be highly visible to its target audience.

Promotion

Clearly existing FTC customers were, as they say, the 'lowest hanging fruit' and we drove uptake extensively across the FTC site, including a strong call to action on the home page, the destination guide pages and the booking conformation page.

However, we also wanted to push the widget out:

Brand profile pages were built in each of the main social networks which meant every time someone downloaded the Facebook widget, it triggered a 'social action' which appeared in their friend's news feed.
Contextual targeting was used across social networks serving ads to consumer who show an interest in holiday terms.
Display ads were used in online travel booking sites and 'banter' sites like bore.me etc.
Paid search was used to drive uptake using niche terms relevant to our target group.
The widget was seeded among bloggers and in widget galleries to increase visibility

Outcome

Since launching mid September, (not the best time for holidays) the uptake of the widget has been hugely successful. After being live for 6 weeks it achieved:

13,800 widget downloads and growing (Facebook's 2nd most downloaded application in October)
Since launch, 21% of FTC customers have downloaded the widget
The widget has driven additional traffic to FTC's website that's resulted in an 8% year on year increase

Return on Investment

The incremental revenue generated covered the cost of the media, production and all other associated costs by week 10.. from then on its pure profit!