Cannes Lions
OGILVY & MATHER ADVERTISING, London / EXPEDIA / 2014
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Expedia is the original online travel agent. Founded in the US in 1995, launched in the UK in 1998, it ushered out the age of the high street travel agent and ushered in the age of online booking.
But by 2012, Expedia had become a victim of the success of the market it created. Increased competition led to strangling price wars, while the rise of new, but expensive, traffic sources (Google, Price comparison websites) ate away at margins even further.
With every passing year, Expedia’s margins shrank. It seemed like the value to be gained from retailing travel had all but evaporated.
This was a problem across Europe, but manifested itself differently in different types of markets. In mature markets where Expedia was a household name, the competitive landscape forced us into a stagnation of growth. In markets where Expedia’s legacy was smaller, we were struggling to gain a foothold.
Change was needed.
In this submission, we will demonstrate how one idea had the power to effectively alter the fate for Expedia in two of its key European markets, being equally effective for both an established and a nascent market situation.
We will demonstrate how we redefined the value Communications added to the business. How consumers were successfully convinced of that redefined value. Reframing travel retail from a cost to be minimised, to an investment in the transformational p of travel. Our proposition was clear: ‘Travel matters, so make the most of it.’ Our creative idea was bold: Travel Yourself Interesting. We took the risk of breaking with the clichés of travel advertising, not focussing on destinations or deals, but on the effect that travel can have on you as a person. The risk paid off.
We will show how our strategy overturned the margin decline in both the UK and France – crucially transforming the fate of this retailer from a slow demise to a vital future.
The Travel Yourself Interesting campaign managed to:
• Achieve a campaign ROMI of 1:11 in the UK and 1:6 in France
• Grow Bookings Value for Expedia by 8% in the UK and an amazing 33% in France. We also saw growth in value per transaction in both markets.
• We did this by driving more people directly to our proprietary retail channels; transactions coming directly through our branded channels grew by 3% in the UK and 9% in France.
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