How The Liberty Guild Distilled Down the Essence of loveholidays' Unique Offering

Q> What was your objective with the campaign? 

Gemma> loveholidays has grown to become the largest online travel agent in the UK and Ireland. We’ve built this off a strong foundation with our data and insights-driven performance marketing function, however, brand marketing remains relatively new to the business, with the function coming into fruition in September 2022. 

Because of this, we have lower prompted awareness than some of our key competitors and we are on a mission to change this. Therefore, it was important our first national brand campaign helped to increase brand awareness while driving purchase intent during peak booking season in the travel sector. It was also important it highlighted what makes us different from others in the sector, with a particular focus on showing customers how easy it is to create their perfect package holiday on our platform in just a few taps.

Q> How does this fit into your overall plans as a business in the next year and the next five years?

Gemma> Our ambition is to become Europe’s number one holiday provider and having a recognisable, trusted brand is a key part of achieving this. As we continue to scale into new product categories and markets, we’ll continue to invest in brand building to ensure more consumers are aware of us and are primed to choose us when it comes to booking their next holiday.

Q> How did the Liberty Guild’s unique offering help deliver the campaign? What does it offer that other agencies can’t? 

Gemma> We loved working with the team at The Liberty Guild on this campaign. What’s great about their offering is the global reach of their network. The ability to tap into creatives and strategists from across the globe whilst still having the expert support of a centrally managed account team gives us the best of both worlds.

Q> With tech moving so quickly, what challenges did an animated ad present? 

Gemma> Tech does move quickly. But the craft of storytelling remains somehow constant. While we can now talk to people in many channels in many ways, how we engage and catch an eye is about craft. The Liberty Guild distilled down the essence of our unique offering, the ability to build a bespoke holiday from the search up, and told that with maximum impact. A compelling visualisation of that fingertip control ensured thumb-stopping content in everyone’s feeds… and anywhere else they encountered the work. Standout in today's world is so important. Both for a disruptive business. And for its advertising. 

Q> Why the giant hand? 

Gemma> One of the key aims of the campaign was to showcase the breadth of choice of destinations we offer and highlight how easy it is to tailor your holiday to fit your needs by using the filters on our platform. The giant hand amplifies the sense of empowerment a customer feels when booking a holiday with us and highlights that the ability to create your perfect package holiday really is ‘at your fingertips’.

Q> How has the market changed since Covid and how have you adapted the offering? 

Gemma> We’ve seen a surge in demand for holidays post-pandemic. The inability to go abroad during lockdown gave people a new sense of appreciation for holidays, which is why we’re seeing people doing everything they can to hold on to them in the context of the cost of living crisis.

At the heart of our proposition is our focus on making travel accessible to more people and opening the world to everyone by offering an unrivalled choice of great value holidays. We work with all major airlines and over 37,000 hotels across 76 destinations worldwide, enabling us to cater for all budgets from 1* to 5* getaways. We’ve also worked hard to offer competitive payment plans, so customers can spread the cost of their holidays over time instead.

Q> How did the brand refresh help steer the campaign?

Gemma> At the end of 2022, we undertook a brand refresh and a key part of the project at the time was reviewing our positioning within the market. An output of this was our new brand proposition ‘the smart way to get away’. As an online travel agent, ‘smartness’ is at the core of what we do, so it was crucial we showcased how clever our platform is and how easy the process of booking your next holiday through it is. 

Q> How did the research and regional testing inform the campaign? What was it and what did it tell you?

Gemma> Using data and insights to inform our approach is at the heart of our business, so we applied this recipe for success to our brand marketing strategy. Regional testing was a natural starting point for our brand journey to gain learnings of what could potentially work for us as we began our journey to scale nationally.

The timing also worked perfectly to kickstart our regional activity at the start of 2023, as in December 2022 we had undertaken a brand refresh, reinvigorating the loveholidays brand with an evolved look and feel and new brand positioning as ‘the smart way to get away’.

After the first burst of activity, we undertook a 360 review, which included a review of our brand health in the market and causal impact analysis to review the impact on sessions and bookings. We saw an uplift within the target region from brand awareness through to bookings. We used the learnings from the regional tests to inform our national approach using a similar mix of channels as we scaled. 

For this campaign, in addition to the brand performance analysis, we also undertook a creative review process with the team at The Liberty Guild who undertook pre and post-testing to ensure our campaign hit the mark with our key target audiences.

Q> What are the challenges in the travel market at the moment? How are you tackling them? 

Gemma> The cost of living crisis remains a challenge for consumers and is having an impact on every aspect of their lives. While our proposition always revolves around offering the best value for money, we’re continuing to offer competitive payment plans to enable our customers to spread the cost of their holidays. Broader industry challenges including climate change, geo-political instability and industrial action are more out of our control, but we have invested heavily in our customer service function to support our customers during periods of disruption.