We used LinkedIn’s API to create “Mapped Out”, an app allowing business travellers to map their LinkedIn contacts to their upcoming travel schedules (and cross reference them by industry and sector).

Mapped Out helped our target turn travel plans into profitable business opportunities, by telling them who would be where on any given day. They could highlight their travel plans to their peers and even book their Etihad flight from within the app.

We promoted Mapped Out via LinkedIn to travellers heading to Abu Dhabi, India and Washington, Etihad’s new routes.

Then, in a media first use of advertising technology, we placed cookies on all LinkedIn users of the app to track their browsing habits.

We used this data to create a pool of ‘lookalike’ targets – people who mirrored the online behaviours of typical Etihad customers, or consumers interested in our key destinations – to dramatically broaden our reach.

Etihad has reached new heights and is now driving heavy acquisition from competitors.

Awareness is sky-high; brand impression is up 10% and airline consideration +9%.

We’ve put Etihad (and a useful tool) in front of a hard-to-reach, time-poor audience at 20% the CPM of regular business media.

ROI has increased 300%, whilst our ‘lookalike’ profiling approach enabled us to triple the pool of LinkedIn business travellers at a fraction of the cost.

Finally, we mapped out more than 205 million miles worth of LinkedIn connections – enough to fly around the world 32,000 times.

Now Etihad is really flying.