Published by isobel.regan@dontpanicprojects.com
Published Date 07.08.2023 
Contiki offer more than 350 trips worldwide. Contiki makes travel a shared experience, exclusively for 18–35-year-olds. Whether travellers join a Contiki solo or in a group, they’ll share incredible experiences with fellow travellers from all over the world. We make travel easy, with transport, accommodation and many meals and experiences included. Travel isn’t just about where you go, it’s about what you do when you get there. That’s why Contiki hand-pick’s the best experiences for their travellers. Travel comes with responsibilities. That’s why we’re determined to travel sustainably and consciously, and to take a stand on the issues closest to our hearts. MAKE TRAVEL MATTER® is our commitment to protect people, wildlife and the incredible planet we all share.
The “Best Use of Automation” award highlights the commitment we have to streamlining our operations through technology and innovation. Faced with the challenge of creating marketing materials quickly and efficiently into the market, we found a solution with Smartly’s automation tool. This tool allows us to generate a custom product feed using Google Docs paired with a flexible creative template.
Our strategy was to re-engage audiences who visited our website but did not convert and to introduce our top trips to the market in a timely, data-driven way. We segmented this audience based on their viewed destinations, enabling us to remarket destination-based trips using automation.
The integration with Smartly empowers us to utilise real-time data from our website on our top trips. We populate a template, generating a significant volume of creative ad variations that can be automatically deployed into our remarketing campaigns across paid social channels.
An obstacle we wanted to overcome was the limited availability of design resources. With Smartly’s creative template solution, our design team can create one creative design template and connect it to the automated feed, producing multiple ad variations, from static to video. This frees up time for our design team to work on other projects.
By leveraging data from our call centres and website, we’re able to update our automated feed quickly with trending trips and high-demand destinations. This data directly influences the automated creative build, ensuring we’re always running relevant ads.
Thanks to the advanced capabilities of this innovative tool, we have achieved remarkable improvements in our paid media. We have revolutionised our creative ad production process, resulting in visually captivating and imaginative ads that perfectly cater to the preferences of potential travel prospects.
Our newfound efficiency allows us to generate multiple ad variations instantly, a contrast to the time-consuming days we once spent developing new creatives manually. We’re working smarter and faster with our creative production and we’re now in a position to generate multiple variations at the click of a button, versus spending days developing new creatives.
The results have been outstanding. Our click through rate is higher, and our Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) has shown significant improvement. This impressive result proves that the more personalised, highly relevant ads convert better than standard tactical messaging.
In summary, our adoption of this sophisticated tool has empowered us to work smarter and faster, achieving outstanding outcomes and amplifying our paid media advertising success.
We take immense pride in being shortlisted for the European Paid Media Awards, a recognised and renowned award that celebrates and acknowledges the significance of paid media. This nomination not only reflects our dedication to striving for the best paid media, but also validates its pivotal role in our business growth. We are honoured and proud to be nominated in this category for these prestigious awards.
