The online travel industry is a highly competitive landscape, where it's hard to have a strong product differentiation and where industry leaders make big investments in order to maintain their market share.

We are an online company and digital is our main acquisition channel, so this was the driver behind our digital first campaign which had clear and distinctive elements, to make it stand out from all the travel content that is online, and with a scalable production model that could help us to address different messages to different users.

We created "whatever makes you pink campaign", encouraging people to do what they love, what makes them PINK. We delivered this message by creating a CGI flamingo and a set of flamingo emojis, that we called "flamojis."

On lastminute.com we can’t stop being what we are, authentic, bold, jazzy, switched-on, inspiring. And pink.

Like flamingos, who - in fact - aren’t born pink but they turn pink doing what they love: eating shrimp.

This insight resonates perfectly with our brand purpose of inviting people to 'get busy living' by doing more of what they love and making the most of their life through travel. This led us to our new brand slogan, 'Whatever makes you pink', applied to all of our creative, which has created a consistent message throughout the campaign.

We wanted to

GET: DINKS (Double Income, no kids), and group of friends in the UK, IT and FR

TO: consider booking holidays with lastminute.com

BY: getting excited about the amazing experiences you can enjoy

We turned the production model around - from TV brand led to social response led. We made it successful by combining emotional brand elements with hard working call-to-actions and used an algorithmic approach to reach the right people.

We executed these objectives through two big creative elements - adaptable to our different target audiences, markets, formats, products and channels across Europe - both of which starred our iconic campaign mascot:

- 'feathers', a CGI flamingo production

- 'flamoji', a set of animated flamingo emojis

We produced 1000s of variations of the original flamingo for social platforms to fit the many and diverse holiday destinations, packages and experiences we offer.

Creative video structure: Enagagement-product integration-CTA

Starting from March 2018 our campaign was live with a PESO approach to content (Paid-Earned-Shared-Owned), leveraging our platforms and expanding to third party media.

Our website and user journey have been customized with the campaign elements of flamingo and flamojis

Social campaign: always on with different creatives and messages

Giphy channel with our animated flamoji

Tv: 2 tv spots in UK, France, Italy (April-May+June-August)

OOH: Static Billboards and Digital mega screen (April), Full wrap buses (June)

Retargeting, Affiliates, CRM: always on

All creative had a strong and clear CTA

Thanks to a scalable and flexible production model we are able to easily adapt our campaign to different messages and different media placement.

How did we scale a complex CGI production? We created 20 different flamingo movements, we matched them with different destinations backgrounds and we added different products and call to actions, based on channels and targeted users

Since we launched this campaign our communication become much more effective, we saw an increasing CTR and a longer completion rate of our creatives. These are some of the most remarkable results that we got:

Reach: + 500 million people reached across different platforms and countries

Engagement: + 10 million volume of engagement on social

Sales: + 25% increase since the launch of the campaign

Visits: 58% decrease in the cost of visits to our website (YOY, similar campaign)