The Wonderful World Of Wotifia

Objectives

The rapid onset of more cashed-up players into the market since Wotif’s launch in 2000, has seen the competition eat into Wotif’s heartland. The agency was tasked to increase unaided awareness, improve consideration and preference drive sales and put Wotif back on the radar for the next generation of travellers.

Campaign

Match Media focused on digital media as young travellers plan and find inspiration online, so the agency took its audience on a journey, creating a new holiday destination – Wonderful Wotifia (Wotif.com), a fictional world with its own quirky national anthem. This centrepiece was a long-form video featuring a parody of old school travel ads and a complex digital media ‘travel-scape’. The agency built a similar reach curve model to TV using YouTube and Vevo first-video view and social video seeding to get quick scale and traction. Seven bloggers acted as travel journalists reporting from Wotifia, bring it to life through rich content. The agency partnered with News Digital to run a series of native articles which took the form of news stories to create anticipation and awe around Wotifia. Media Match partnered with Google to collect user signals and build audience lists for further brand messaging and follow-up retail messaging. Taking lines from Wotifia’s anthem, the agency hijacked topical social moments to ensure content enriched consumers’ social feeds across Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Results

Match Media’s campaign drove over 1.5 million unique views of the video in the first two days, exceeding target by more than 200%. The bloggers drove 450,000 post views, leading to five times the benchmark. Hijacking of social moments exceeded target by 20% and there were over 500,000 social engagements. Native articles exceeded page view targets by 50%; Wotif was the number one branded search term in the online travel category during the campaign; there was 19% growth in ‘intent to book’ against the next generation demo; and a

117% rise in brand recall. Wotif achieved its highest sales figures in two years.

Judges Comments

A genuinely different campaign for the category. It was bold, had a unique idea and achieved great results.