Taking place at a highly competitive and commercially crucial time, the January Sale 2019 campaign, ‘The Power of Suggestion’ for British Airways set out to empower travellers to take the plunge and make that booking. We worked with the brand to deliver a dynamically served campaign, advertising routes in specific locations in real time.

Research found that people viewed their January getaway as their ‘big trip’ and that this pressure led to nearly half finding the booking procedure stressful (Kayak 2017). Additionally, customers often admitted to knowing ‘what’ they wanted to do, although many were unclear on ‘where’ with the opportunity to influence clearly demonstrable. Additionally, two thirds (67% - Expedia 2017) admitted to looking online for inspiration when it came to destination selection.

When we dove into Google search trends around sale destinations, we discovered that searches fluctuate considerably by day, time and UK location (WM Team Horizon Google Search analysis, 2018).

We’d implemented a similar approach in August 2018 and looked to expand the creative to further build on the successful results achieved and to increase sales and traffic directed to select destinations. Specifically, our goals were to;

• Increase revenue versus last year and drive greater sale engagement.

• Increase campaign cut through and engagement versus last year.

• Further integrate performance marketing and increase consistent messaging and contextual relevance.

We were required to use the existing creative platform, ‘What are you waiting for?’, and so our media approach alone had to do the heavy lifting to achieve the set objectives.

A nuanced approach was required to empower travellers to take the plunge and make a booking. Our strategy was therefore to increase our relevancy among a wider traveller audience, by tapping into and aligning with consumer-driven travel trends and conversations.

We developed a custom algorithm which delivered a locally relevant approach ensuring we closely mimicked what travellers were already discussing and searching for.

We were proud to achieve a world media first by serving certain British Airways Sale destinations to DOOH dynamically and in real-time, based on locally trending destinations. This ensured we capitalised on up to the minute travel interests.

The platform for the campaign was DOOH.com’s innovative D4 RUSH platform which enabled us to be creative in real time, with changes triggered by live search API data. Copy changes were guided by a custom algorithm built by the Wavemaker Technology team to scrape BA Google Search account, pulling in search data for our Sale destinations in UK cities and London postcodes in real time. Our algorithm then gave each destination a ‘popularity’ weighting it based on local search volume, which determined how much any given destination would be served in a local area.

Live search data was refreshed multiple times daily, which allowed for up to 16 weighting changes per day, across 14 days and 269 locations, which totalled an impressive 744,576 optimisations during the campaign.

Our relevant, real time approach was seamlessly achieved by having a collaborative integrated team – across strategy, media, technology and creative – to bring this to life in a short space of time and allowing us to achieve our three key aims of unprecedented regularity, speed and relevance. This ultimately resulted in incredibly successful commercial and brand outcomes for British Airways; traffic to BA.com was up 14% versus last year and revenue through direct bookings was up 6%.

Importantly, routes that were dynamically served on DOOH yielded an 8% year on year increase, whereas routes that had fixed media placements increased by 1%, and routes not advertised at all decreased 1%. (BA Revenue Management 2019).