‘Day of influence’ was conceived by Newsworks to demonstrate the impact of reaching an audience of more than 20 million people across newsbrands in one day.
PHD and Expedia won the Day of influence package for a campaign to promote tourism back to the Philippines following the devastation of typhoon Haiyan. The Day of influence package gave them the opportunity to influence people’s beliefs and behaviour, while supporting the recovery of tourism as a valuable source of income.
The aim of the campaign was to raise awareness and understanding of the Philippines as a holiday destination and encourage consumers to discover more at Expedia’s specially created site, TravelThatMatters.co.uk.
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.
According to Newsworks: more than 30,000 people visited the ‘Travel That Matters’ site, with online interaction rates 160% higher than DoubleClick benchmarks.
The tablet interstitials, created by Adnostic, saw 275,326 page views overall and almost 10,000 taps through to the Travel That Matters blog. The CTR average was 3.6% (246% higher than the retail and travel benchmark established by Newsworks’ Tablet Project).
The response to the print ads was exceptional. It was not a direct response campaign and readers needed to type in a brand new URL (not supported by search or found via the Expedia site) yet the print ads delivered a response rate that was 52% higher than DR averages.
The campaign, designed by Ogilvy to run across all major UK newsbrands in print, tablet, online and mobile, also resulted in a 55% year on year uplift in searches for the Philippines on Expedia.co.uk.
Jill Lloyd, senior PR manager at Expedia.co.uk, said: “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 impact of the campaign, both in terms of traffic to the site and the increase in searches on Expedia.co.uk, clearly shows the power of newsbrands to change attitudes and deliver results.”
Emma Callaghan, press account director at Omnicom Media Group's PHD, said: “We wanted to use the power of newsbrands to raise awareness and change perceptions. PHD put together a media schedule that would ensure we were highly impactful across multiple platforms using rich media and large formats. Newsbrands gave us the opportunity to tell the Philippines’ story and we’re very pleased with the results.”
Rufus Olins, chief executive of Newsworks, said: “We set out to get the nation talking. These results prove that we achieved it. It’s great to see newsbrands collaborating to offer such a unique package, for a campaign that encompassed all platforms and demonstrated a real chance to make a difference.”
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, The Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Sun, The Times and The Daily Telegraph.
