The Background
Aer Lingus, a much-loved brand had lost its shine after a year of challenges, from covid fears to flight cancellations. The mission was to reignite everyone’s love for the brand. AV was the driving force in increasing brand preference scores by 14 percentage points whilst also delivering over 180,000 flights
This campaign won a Highly Commended Award in the Best Use of TV Strategy category at the TAMI Awards 2024
The Challenge
Aer Lingus had spent months struggling with cancelled flights, baggage issues and negative news coverage, resulting in Consumer Preference scores being at an all-time low. The cost-of-living crisis was also having a negative effect on consumers’ holiday plans. January is Aer Lingus’ most important promotional period and a strong start to the year is critical. OMD also knew that strong brand presence in January delivers a delayed sales effect across the year.
The most significant task at hand was to win back the hearts of our consumers and once again become their preferred airline. The airline’s brand preference target for 2023 was 43.3%. Prior to the campaign launch the preference score was just 36.3%, an all-time low.
In 2023 Aer Lingus were striving to ‘reset’; back to 2019 sales levels. Given the status of the brand and the remaining covid hangover on the category, this would be a huge challenge.
The Strategy
Aer Lingus’ brand repositioning was built on emotion and trust where TV’s principal role was to rebuild the love and pride in the airline. OMD have delivered multiple research studies on Attention as a planning metric and their learnings have had a significant influence on their approach for Aer Lingus. These studies explained that active attention directly affects long term & short-term advertising strength and brand
uplift, as well as conversion rates for online sales. Therefore, planning for optimum attention was key to success for both sales and brand KPIs.
Research has also shown that longer “active attention” is required for campaigns such as a product launch, or to establish new brand positioning, while well-known brands and a tactical message needed less attention. So, wthey applied these insights to the January campaign and they become the backbone of a two-pronged strategy.
For the Brand campaign where our objective was to drive Preference, they required a higher attention strategy and longer time lengths to build an emotional connection establishing a new brand proposition “You’re Very Welcome”.
We looked to engage active attention through a heavyweight campaign, with programming selection at the heart of the strategy. 3 key strands of programming were:
1. Live & co-viewing programming
2. Emotive programming
3. Relevancy – optimal travel environment
The Tactical Strategy focused on selling flights, and so required a different attention strategy. AV came out as the top channel to deliver direct response at scale. Only this time, using shorter time lengths and less active attention, using a clear, simple, call to action: “Book Now”.
This Campaign had a short-term focus where we wanted to build fast reach, frequency and a clear call to action to make other media channels more effective. Showing the flexibility and power of AV, a tailored strategy for the tactical sales message was crucial in maximising effectiveness and efficiency. With this in mind, OMD planned a Virgin Media sponsorship takeover in January, dominating the station and reminding people that the holiday planning
season had arrived.
AV was crucial to both strategies and by planning for attention, OMD used AV in very distinct ways to ensure both brand and tactical strategies complemented each other.
The Plan
Brand: The brand campaign was our big chance to re-ignite love for the brand by driving preference using longer attention formats to drive an emotional connection. OMD remained steadfast to their attention strategy using 60” & 40” spots as the importance of deliveringthe brand story effectively outweighed cost efficiencies that shorter lengths would have offered.The focus was on 3 programming strands;
– Live & Co-viewing Programming: Cherry-picking high attention programmes
-Emotive Programming: a programme strategy reflected the desire to live side by side with the pride and emotion that audiences felt while watching programming such as live sports and DIY SOS.
-Relevancy – Perhaps an under-utilised AV advantage is the ability to align with highly relevant content. Programmes
such as Gordon, Gino & Fred’s Italian Road Trip and Love Island surrounded by sun and swimming pools was the perfect environment to target our bullseye consumer both on VOD and TV.
Tactical: With the strategy of focusing on less active attention, the execution was about building hard and fast frequency and reach in order to drive flight sales. The Sponsorship takeover with Virgin Media delivered just that through short and succinct 10” & 5” high frequency messages. It encouraged consumers to “escape the everyday with Aer Lingus”, which looked to inspire consumers during the winter period to book their 2023 holiday.
The takeover package ran over 3 weekends with stings running on all unsponsored shows throughout the day on Virgin Media One, Two a
The Tactical AV campaign was supported by a wider campaign across Radio, OOH and Digital announcing the sale and highlighting key offers to Europe and USA. All while the Brand activity ran simultaneously, ensuring all channels were working hard in tandem
The Results
Aer Lingus had the toughest brand challenge the company had ever faced, however, through the power of an AV strategy designed with both brand and tactical in mind, it was the perfect companion to lift them back into the skies.
OMD set out to win back consumer preference and inspire them to fly with Aer Lingus. The markers set were incredibly ambitious considering the competitive set and environment. This media campaign took advantage of AV’s unique and diverse strengths.
• In 2023 with less budget than 2019, a cost-of-living crisis and in the face of huge negative sentiment, the campaign successfully delivered 180,000 flights; an over-delivery against the target of achieving 2019 levels of sales.
• In December 2022 the brand preference score for Aer Lingus was just 36% (average is 42%). In February 2023 post brand campaign, that score has increased to 51% knocking their full year 2023 target of 43% out of the park.
These results demonstrate the significant contribution AV can make in tackling the toughest challenges.
“The clever AV strategy developed by OMD not only addressed our Brand and Business challenges but also ensured our campaigns complemented each other rather than competed. We had significant brand scores and sales targets to achieve and TV played a vital role in delivering above and beyond these targets. ”
Deirdre Sheehan, Aer Lingus Marketing Manager
Credits
Brand:
Aer Lingus
Media Agency:
OMD
Supporting agencies/teams:
Droga 5
Virgin Media Solutions
Award:
Highly Commended Award in the Best Use of TV Strategy category at the TAMI Awards 2024