With a goal to be the best leisure airline, Thomas Cook Airlines is an expanding business with aggressive growth targets. It is currently developing its fleet, opening new routes and refurbishing existing planes.
“We are competing against global brands with big budgets so a key target for us is to increase awareness,” explains Helen Atkinson, online partner marketing manager for Thomas Cook Airlines Group. “We looked to display advertising as a medium that could increase brand awareness and help us reposition the brand for the modern independent traveller.”
In this context, the brand has seen programmatic as a way to be clever with its ad spend. Working with Infectious Media, Thomas Cook Airlines launched its programmatic strategy in September 2014, carefully pin-pointing an audience that would be receptive to its message. “With travel being such a low-margin business, we need to fill airplane seats and we target down to which airports customers fly from and which routes they fly,” explains Atkinson. “Driving customers to book at an aggressive ROI target is hard, but getting them to book from one specific destination to another is even harder: we saw programmatic advertising’s ability to target display advertising with this level of accuracy as a major opportunity.”
A core part of Thomas Cook Airlines’ strategy is to drive sales of specific flights by targeting based on airport vicinity. It will typically start the month with targets of which flights it wants to enhance and use location targeting to advertise within a specific airport catchment area for a flight destination the brand wants to sell. For example, it uses one set of creative when advertising a flight from Glasgow International to Antalya, Turkey, and a different one when advertising a flight from Bristol to Gran Canaria, Spain.
Another core part of the airline’s strategy is deriving revenue from seat upgrades and add-ons. After a customer has booked, there is typically a window of opportunity for them to upgrade or add to their in-flight experience. Thomas Cook Airlines uses advertising to drive them to spend more, treating themselves with meals, extra baggage allowance or perhaps a move from economy class to premium class.
“We use our first-party data of what customers have purchased and if they upgrade to inform the campaign,” says Atkinson. “Although a relatively small pool, this is working well to drive more ancillary revenue from customers.”
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