PHDExpediaTravel That MattersBest Newsbrand Campaign

Executive summary

At the recent MediaTel conference, ‘the Future of Newspapers,’ a key theme when debating the future of newsbrands and their survival was industry collaboration.

In 2014, Newsworks, along with UK national newspapers united to create their very own ‘Super Bowl’ moment for the first time – a ‘Day of influence’ – giving advertisers the opportunity to reach an audience of 20 million people in one day.

In an unprecedented move, on 29 August 2014 six leading newspaper groups collaborated to run a multi-platform campaign promoting expedia.co.uk’s CSR project around encouraging tourism to the Philippines.

The aim of the campaign was to demonstrate the power, reach and influence of newsbrands. And that’s exactly what we did.

Background & objectives Our story began in April, when PHD pitched Expedia’s idea to support the recovery of tourism to the Philippines (following the devastation of typhoon Haiyan), at Newsworks’ Shift 2014 conference. The idea focused on the power of tourism to change a country’s fortune and future and how newsbrands could influence this.

Our objectives were very clear:

• To raise awareness of the Philippines as a holiday destination

• To encourage consumers to discover more about the Philippines on Expedia’s blog

• To encourage consideration and booking and reassure people that the Philippines was a safe place to visit and ‘open for business’

• To educate people about Expedia’s CSR project (through Expedia’s blog)

Although Expedia employees had raised over $50,000 for charity partners working in the Philippines, there was no marketing budget to support the CSR project or to run a media campaign, so the Day of the influence was the only way to give us a voice.

The overall planning priorities were two fold – firstly to address an issue (in reaction to tourism in the Philippines) and secondly to encourage education and understanding, developing a greater depth of understanding as to why this destination is significant.

Slides to accompany the Day of influence pitch

Emma Callaghan (pitching for PHD) with Newsworks chairman David Pattison

Insight

“When 8% of the GDP and 2.9 million jobs depend on tourism, the recovery of the tourism industry is vital to the country’s overall recovery. Simply by holidaying there you can make a difference and support the recovery from this tragedy. So this campaign aims to increase consideration of the Philippines as a holiday destination and to show, through the personal experiences on travelthatmatters.co.uk, that the people of the Philippines welcome tourism.”

Mel Stonier, senior marketing manager, Expedia.co.uk.

As the world’s largest online travel agent, Expedia had seen an opportunity to use its scale and influence to help countries in distress. The 2013 typhoon in the Philippines affected 14 million people and continues to have an impact today. The Travel That Matters campaign used the Day of influence to raise awareness and encourage holiday-goers to re-consider the Philippines, knowing they will make a difference to the country’s recovery.

Newsbrands are where campaigning happens. It was newsbrands that first reported typhoon Haiyan and the devastation that it caused. In November 2013, the Philippines commanded the news because of this so we wanted to use the Day of influence to put the Philippines all over the news again, but this time with a positive message. Newsworks already had many stats linking newsbrand readers (both paper and online) with travel brands – newspaper readers are 19% more likely than the UK average to have taken three or more holidays in the last three months and online newsbrand readers are more likely to visit travel sites than the average internet user.

PHD worked closely with Ogilvy and Expedia in terms of the creative direction. Ogilvy’s insight found that the Philippines is a destination mainly researched for both luxury and activity/diving holidays. The creative aimed to focus on using one day to get people to stop, sample and savour the richness of the Philippines islands using Expedia’s ‘Travel Yourself Interesting’ brand messaging, which for this campaign became Travel That Matters.

Ogilvy’s creative goal was clear - to raise awareness and drive consideration from our UK Believers audience by contrasting the unspoiled nature of the Philippines with the English-isms they may find elsewhere. With this in mind, Ogilvy ‘painted the papers and news sites blue’ for the day, focusing on interesting and unknown facts about the Philippines, coupled with images of unspoiled islands.

The CSR message was not a suitable lead message in terms of driving consideration to travel, but the Travel That Matters blog and PR around the campaign provided the correct platforms to deliver that additional message in full.

As further encouragement to visit the blog and using the fact that the Philippines is a luxury destination, we decided to incentivise consumers further through a competition to win a luxury break for two.

The plan

In partnership with the Philippines Tourist Board and the Habitat for Humanity charity, Expedia, PHD and Ogilvy created a powerful multi-platform newsbrand campaign, supported by the travelthatmatters.co.uk microsite, which hosted blogs and key facts, as well as information about how a trip to the Philippines will help the country, along with direct links to donate and book.

The expedia.co.uk campaign ran across all major UK newsbrand platforms – print, tablet, online and mobile – on Friday 29 August 2014 in the Guardian, i, The Independent, Evening Standard, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Sun, The Times and The Daily Telegraph.

The main aim was to drive awareness and impact, so in print we ran multiple formats – 25x4s, 34x4 or similar bookends, half pages and full pages. We ran takeovers of home pages or travel sections across all sites, with a built in video that automatically played. All copy clicked through to the Travel That Matters site. One piece of print copy in each paper promoted the competition to win a holiday and you could also click to enter through the digital and tablet ads.

Adnostic designed a world first ad format for newsstand: two creative executions served in one ad file, therefore incorporating the branding message and the competition direct response message. This ad format is especially challenging as all national press titles use different publishing platforms and there are ad file size limitations which can limit ad complexity. The ad can be viewed here in Google Chrome: http://preview.adnostic.io/expedia/philippines/v2/ Username: adnostic-vip, Password: backstagepass

Travel that Matters site

Results

The pre and post-campaign tracking results show the impact of reaching a huge and engaged audience in one go, with 60% of readers recalling the campaign, 71% liking it and 62% motivated to find out more. Read the full case study, with downloadable charts, via: http://www.newsworks.org.uk/Research-Centre/expedia-day-of-influence-case-study

Client view

“On 29 August the only promotion we used were newsbrands and in most cases users needed to remember and actively type in a brand new website address. So the results of the campaign both in terms of traffic to the campaign site and the increase in searches on expedia.co.uk clearly showed the power of newsbrands to change attitudes and stimulate interest. We were very pleased to see that as a result of this campaign more people are considering the Philippines as a holiday destination and we hope that through our newsbrand campaign we have been able to provide valuable support for the country’s economic recovery.”

Jill Lloyd, senior PR manager, Expedia EMEA