BRAND: Skiddoo

INDUSTRY & TYPE: Online travel agency (B2C)

BRAND PROFILE: multinational online travel agency with a proprietary filter and search algorithm that makes finding your perfect flight effortless.

MY ROLE: Chief Marketing Officer, Philippines

the ten-second twitter video campaign that crushed it

Several years ago, I spent a quarter standing up the marketing department for Skiddoo, an online travel agency entering the Philippine market. The marketing plan I wrote called for aggressive social media marketing as part of our demand generation efforts, which we were spending $50,000 per month on.

DISCOVERY

My account executive at Twitter let me know that Twitter video ads (a new format at the time—way before TikTok) were selling for $0.01 per view for videos that lasted 10 seconds or less, and I resolved to capitalize on that somehow. The idea posed some challenges:

1. What sort of content can an online travel agency display in a 10 second video that will increase brand awareness, increase brand trust, or result in a conversion?

2. Stock photography/video will look overproduced. Where will we source authentic content that we have permission to use?

format

A central tenet of content marketing is that truly useful content given away freely increases brand trust. After some testing, I decided on a slideshow that featured a cover image and five slides: four captioned images plus a final slide with branding on it.

The cover image would show the title and our branding (logo and slogan), and since it was the cover for the video, the titles would need to stimulate enough curiosity to compel a click to start the video. Then four slides would run, at two second intervals, and end with a co-branded slide thanking our content partner. We chose not to include a call to action button to reduce the “commercialized” look of the video and increase shareability. Our video’s music bed came from the video production software we were using, which had a library of stock music available for use.

content

Sourcing low- or no-cost content through partnerships is one of my marketing skills. I contacted the most well known travel bloggers in the Philippines, including Anton Diaz, a global top 100 travel blogger and made them a proposal: “Would you allow us to use photographs from your blog articles in exchange for co-branding in a Twitter video campaign that we’re going to run? In return for allowing us to use your content, we’ll expose your brand to hundreds of thousands of Filipinos interested in travel who may not already be aware of your blog."

The bloggers didn’t have to do anything, as we’d be mining their blogs for photos we wanted, so it was no surprise that everyone we approached agreed. Now we could use photographs of destinations all around the country for free; I just needed a concept that Twitter users would find interesting enough to click and watch, and useful enough to act on.

concept

Based on available psychographic data, we entitled the first video Four Hidden Beaches in the Philippines You Haven’t Visited, while the second video was entitled Four of the Most Romantic Getaways in the Philippines. The top half of the final slide said “Images courtesy of [content partner blog URL]” and displayed their logo, while the bottom half displayed our logo, slogan, and URL/link.

results

1. The campaign was a smashing success, averaging $0.01 per video view.
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2. We garnered 4,116,981 impressions and 498,451 video views—a 12.1% view rate.

3. The campaign generated 350 bookings (almost all new customers).
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4. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) was over 166%.

We did even better when considering the Average Lifetime Value (ALV) of each of those new customers.Using one graphic artist, we produced a very creative campaign with no production costs that helped us build partnerships with travel bloggers and provided the company an effective social media marketing tactic: a repeatable format for short form video that gets results, before the advent of TikTok.

Brand Strategy
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Creating a
Brand Strategy from the Ground Up
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Product Marketing
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User Retention ↑14%
Refund Requests ↓50%
‍Customer Service Contact ↓66%

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Demand Generation
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Impressions: 4.1M
Views: 498k
Return on Ad Spend: 166%

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Tony is a great colleague and leader who knows how and when to motivate, empathize, and inspire the members of his team and he does so with utmost sincerity and enthusiasm.

Robert Yatco
Senior Concepts Officer
GeiserMaclang Marketing Communications

© 2023 Tony Ahn All Rights Reserved

© 2023 Tony Ahn All Rights Reserved