2024 Bronze Travel and Leisure
13 Dec 2024
Agency: Wavemaker Global
Client: London & Partners
Entry Title: Let’s Do London 2023
Executive Summary
Heading into 2023, London tourism’s challenge was to continue driving the visitor recovery, and to position the capital as the must-visit city break among competing destinations.
Strategy
Led by a clear business objective, attract additional international spend to sustain London’s visitor economy, the primary marketing objective was consideration. The team set distinct tasks for the pre-booking phase of the travel journey, to inspire prospective travellers undecided on their future trip destination to visit London, and to convince prospective travellers actively in-market to book a trip to choose London.
Condensing paid coverage into a single heavyweight burst in line with established booking behaviours, the team developed a geo-segmentation framework to identify potential sources of growth.
The targeting strategy prioritised two lower-intent markets where the 2022 campaign achieved impact: France and Germany. ONS ranked the UK fifth globally for consideration in Germany and 34th in France.
Creativity
The creative strategy refined the ‘iconic meets the unexpected’ concept, utilising a dynamic triptych device to showcase the breadth of uniquely-London experiences. Insights, trends and past campaign learnings indicated the new campaign needed to land ‘destination’ and ‘emotional connection’. Alongside this - a balance of iconic, surprising and indulgent were established as the key ingredients - and experience was identified as a critical motivator for destination choice.
Campaign assets were updated to represent our audiences within the visual storytelling, showcasing the breadth of uniquely London visitor experiences - a more welcoming, conversational tone was employed to increase emotional connection.
Assets were adapted to align with the nuances of each media platform. Audio spots were flexed to dovetail with London-centric music playlists on Spotify while influencer-created assets were optimised for delivery across our Meta and TikTok buys respectively to further increase engagement.
Results
Independent surveys recorded campaign recall increases of 57% and 10% vs. 2022 in Germany and France respectively, resulting in tangible perception change; weighted campaign influence scores increased by 62% in Germany and 29% in France year-on-year.
Strongest recall was achieved via contextual targeting in-step with the features of each platform. The work maximised coverage against high-affinity content for target audiences on YouTube to generate year-on-year claimed recall improvements despite lower comparable budgets, and delivered tailored audio spots within London-centric music playlists on Spotify.
The headline partnership drove consideration through signposting one million-plus incremental ‘lookers’ towards London-specific content; audiences to the campaign consumed 63% more content across Tripadvisor overall.
Bookings tracked from exposed audiences in France spent 22% more on hotels and attractions, while exposed audiences in Germany spent 28% and 25% more.
The Team
London & Partners - Simon McCaugherty, Director of Consumer Marketing & Growth - Eliza Ferguson, Head of Consumer Marketing - Ronan Francis, Senior Marketing Manager - Romane Gomez, Consumer Marketing Executive
Wavemaker Global - Ed Fall, Senior Client Partner - John Duku, Global Client Director