Campaign summary

What happens when one of the world’s largest mobility and car rental companies gets hit by a global pandemic? Revenue drops 90% overnight.

The restrictions imposed on domestic and international travel significantly harmed Avis’ business around the world and even with some markets still operating domestic travel, the volume of car rental bookings wasn’t enough to stabalise their business. From March – July 2020 we saw our client team and their business change significantly, furlough, redundancies, restructuring, a change of the guard and the need to deliver more reasons to rent a car from Avis, that wasn’t related to going on holiday.

Quite simply, Avis needed stability and to create more reasons to rent a car. That’s where Collective came in. We were tasked to develop a comms platform with supporting product propositions that enabled Avis to keep communicating at full throttle whilst ensuring we stand out in a sea of sameness, when all car rental competitors are talking about booking with confidence and communicating safety pledges.

We undertook a research phase that looked at international markets, consumer sentiment towards COVID and travel and built a recovery campaign that not only allowed Avis to continue communicating, but to generate millions in revenue. Let us tell you how we did it.

We started by refocusing in on people, to understand the behavioural shifts and define the new customer need for car hire. We caried out at speed, extensive consumer research in 5 markets that helped us to identify the evolved role for ABG with it’s customers.

These data-led insights allowed us to define new use cases for car hire by market, such as:

- Wanting financial flexibility

- Public transport avoiders

- Train or ferry journey extension

And helped us to redefine existing use cases where the motivation may have changed:

- New ad hoc transport requirements caused by Covid, such as volunteering

- Domestic travellers upgrading their owned vehicle

The objectives

Because Avis lost 90% of revenue overnight, the focus was to help the business recover in 2020 and bounce back in 2021. Revenue building was the main objective (and continues this continues to be the focus), developing new propositions and messaging that delivers more value for Avis and its customers to rent cars without being travel related.

Put more simply, the objectives were to:

Identify new audience personas who may need access to a rental car during COVID-19

Diversify brand and product messaging to generate more relevance

Generate an incremental €4.5m in revenue between July-December 2020

The execution

Inspired by one of the classic 60s Avis ads ‘Avis needs you. You don’t need Avis.’, we created a disarmingly honest and self-effacing campaign that really brought home the fact that Avis is nothing without it’s wonderful customers. Put simply, the notion of ‘we want you’.

We brought this to life using a butterfly – a symbol of rebirth, transformation, change, hope, life and, of course, summer.

Our initial creative featured the statement ‘You want care hire on your terms. We want you.’. We were then able to use this simple ‘You’ and ‘We’ device to great effect in lots of different executions and across multiple formats.

We developed highly flexible assets and a messaging framework that made it simple to roll-out the campaign across markets, and for local teams to react quickly to changes. All with the stand-out core brand message at the fore.

Creative assets were built with flexible DCO templates that allowed us to personalise messaging based on where users were in the journey, rental booking dates, cars viewed and specific searches that significantly enhanced remarketing activity, reducing CPM, increase click through rate, lowering cost per acquisition and ultimately increasing the number of conversions.

The results

The campaign and strategy delivered beyond our expectations.

- 26% above revenue target

- 17.6 return on ad spend (ROAS)

- 3x lower cost per acquisition than industry standard

- 5x higher click through rate than previous campaigns in 2020

Avis - On Your Terms

CREDITS

Chris Shadrick

Sonia Rowe

Stephen Barnes

Adam Cleaver

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