Laura Eckrodt spearheads Etihad Airways' digital marketing, data-driven decisions, and AI integration for maximum marketing impact. She has 15+ years experience with the digital transformation of airlines in the Middle East.
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Black Friday? It’s likely smart TVs, mobile phones, laptops, and those amazing sneakers you’ve been eyeing. But you probably didn’t think about plane tickets.
That’s why, when we were tasked with expanding growth in the final quarter of last year, we saw this retail moment as an ideal opportunity to bring travel into the Black Friday game. We partnered with Google and creative agency Impact BBDO to help us conceptualise ‘The Black Friday Takeover’: a personalised video campaign to stop Black Friday shoppers in their tracks and turn them into airline passengers.
Preparing for a smooth take-off
We began by determining our top ten markets, based on countries that tend to buy the most Etihad flight tickets. The Google team then used internal tools to analyse the top YouTube and Search trends in those key markets and understand what products people were looking for.
With both search data and internal sales data at hand, we began pairing products with flight destinations. For example, we know that Australians often visit Paris, London, and New York. Since Paris is a fashion capital and New York is associated with technology, we suggested showing Australians ads promoting Paris for fashion items and New York for electronics.
In some cases, certain destinations didn’t logically pair with specific products. For example, our sales data revealed that some of the U.K.’s top destinations are Karachi, Bangkok, and New Delhi. Since these destinations don't necessarily have a strong association with specific products, our ads focused on people saving money on flights and buying their dream product with the savings.
Turning shoppers into passengers
We wanted our campaign to reach a large number of people with varied interests across multiple markets, which is why a personalised campaign tailored both to a person’s location and what they were looking for made the most sense.
We worked with AI-powered advertising technology company Smartly, who fed our predetermined product and destination pairings into their one-stop AI-powered advertising platform. This helped them transform a single base video into a staggering 2,400 personalised ad variations in mere days.
Each personalised ad features an Etihad cabin crew member pointing to a screen and showing the viewer a product they’d been searching for. The voiceover suggests they buy it in a different country with the money they’ve saved on a discounted Etihad plane ticket.
For example, we knew shoppers in Saudi Arabia were searching for electronics. We also knew that Tokyo is a key destination for that market. So we showed an Arabic-language ad featuring a mobile phone, with Tokyo as the possible purchase destination people could go to get the product while saving on travel costs:
Recognising that London shoppers often search for fashion items, and that Abu Dhabi is a favoured destination for them, we presented an English-language ad showcasing trainers. The ad highlighted the opportunity to buy them in Abu Dhabi while saving on travel with a discounted Etihad flight.
By using AI to automatically swap visuals and messaging, the platform catered to the specific interests of our chosen audiences. It covered hundreds of combinations of products and destinations in English, Arabic, German, and French, and uploaded the ads straight to YouTube for our media agency, Crossmedia, to take live.
First-class marketing move
To maximise the impact of our campaign, Crossmedia launched the campaign in two phases across all markets two weeks before Black Friday. This timing captured heightened consumer interest and drove consideration because people were already searching for products they wanted to buy on Black Friday.
We launched the first week-long phase of our campaign via YouTube Video action campaigns. These are easily scalable across multiple channels, aiding in driving more conversions and reaching new customers. The ads raised awareness of our upcoming ticket sale — which would only start on Black Friday itself — and included a ‘know more’ call-to-action button. Once shoppers clicked through to the landing page, they were asked to provide their email address so we could alert them once the sale had started.
For the second remarketing phase, we used Demand Gen campaigns. The video remained the same as the first phase, with only the call-to-action button changing to encourage people to ‘book now’.
And we used in-market audiences to get our ads in front of people actively browsing online for products or services they wanted to buy. In our case, we’d identified that the products people were searching for ahead of Black Friday were electronics, appliances, fashion, toys, and beauty.
Finally, we leveraged paid Search, using branded search terms like "Etihad" and "Etihad Black Friday" to re-engage users who had seen our video ads but hadn't clicked, yet later actively searched for “Etihad”.
The campaign results were a soaring success. We received 1.8 million visits to our website, a 56% increase in bookings, and a digital revenue increase of 35%. It was our highest revenue from a digital campaign ever, surpassing our previous record by 48%.
As an added bonus, a brand lift study showed us that we drove a Brand Consideration Lift and a Search Lift of our branded Search terms in the majority of markets.
This success serves as a blueprint for our future campaigns, demonstrating how strategic timing, focused messaging, and multi-channel execution can drive exceptional results in the competitive digital landscape.
