BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

Despite remarkably low pricing, demand for Super Savers fell short.

With a Frankfurt-Berlin ticket costing €190 and a regular Saver for the same journey costing €70, Deutsche Bahn’s €19 Super Savers offer incredible value. Competitively priced with even the cheapest intercity buses they offer a far superior travel experience. Yet many of the tickets released each year went unsold.

CREATIVE CHALLENGE

How to stimulate demand for Super Saver tickets at times when most people don’t want to travel, for an audience that finds German destinations boring – with a budget cut in half!

We needed to identify an audience receptive to the idea of cheap tickets, and available to travel at times many would find inconvenient. Then we had to use creativity to persuade them that what they really wanted was an out-of-season trip to somewhere in Germany. The most promising targets were 2.23 million pre- and post-family metropolitans aged 25-59. But in an age of international travel, in a country where 72% prefer to spend their holidays abroad, many of these people were uninspired by the idea of domestic travel. Trying to sell them excursions to Bremen or Dusseldorf wasn’t going to be easy. And with a budget cut from €4.2m to €2.3m it was going to be harder still.

SOLUTION

Insight meets algorithms to uncover ‘exotic’ German destinations.

By examining our audiences’ social media posts we found many pictures of the kinds of exotic places they were interested in visiting – pictures they had either posted, liked or shared. Using search algorithms, we then scanned millions of online images to see if we could find similar scenes at home in Germany. We were as surprised as anyone to discover that whatever your ‘perfect’ travel destination, anywhere in world, you could visit something extraordinarily similar right here in Germany, with no need for an expensive flight. The message of the campaign: No Need To Fly.

EXECUTION

No Need To Fly, an innovative Facebook campaign with the first-ever personalised real-time social media price comparisons. It created the desire that made the cost savings make sense.

We used the bulk of our €2.3m budget to continue the long-running Super Saver campaign. We also used €70,000 to create a new social media campaign tailored for our ‘bullseye’ target audience. Through social media profiling, we identified audiences interested in particular ‘exotic’ locations. Using geotargeting, we worked out how far each individual audience member lived from the nearest airport, and the real-time price of the cheapest available flight to their chosen destination. Then we created real-time price comparisons with almost-identical locations in Germany. You live in Munich, for example, and want to go to Guilin, China, the cheapest available flight might be €1,750. But you can enjoy a near-identical view in Kromlau, Saxony, with a €19 Super Saver.

DESPITE A SIGNIFICANTLY LOWER BUDGET THE CAMPAIGN INCREASED REVENUE BY AN ASTONISHING €28MILLION, A RETURN OF €63.90 FOR EVERY €1 – MORE THAN DOUBLE THE PREVIOUS YEAR’S RATIO!