eTravel Project

[youtube width="300" height="230"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioiECWRcD68[/youtube]

Brand: Curaçao Tourist Board

Execution: A funny television spot of  thirty seconds invites people to run away for a treasure hunt to Curaçao [pronunciation: kyur uh sow], the largest island in the Netherlands Antilles group.  The Curaçao Tourist Board is giving away seventy trips and $500,000, a real travel bailout.

Description: The 30-second video has the format of a news broadcast with an anchorman. Suddenly, people flock in front of the camera to flee for the treasure hunt and the anchorman follows as well. The headlines at the end show a web site where to go and ask for information.

What We Like: The video is funny and looks like a consumer generated streaming video. It speaks to the harsh economic situation and introduces the topic of travel – a luxury during these times – ironically. We love the clear call to action at the end of the spot and that the video can be embedded for viral marketing.

What We Don’t: It misses a bit on the branding opportunity. There is brand interaction only if people go online to www.curacaotreasure.com and fill in the form for the sweepstakes.

Conclusions: A sticky, well-executed campaign.

Brand: Massachusetts Office of  Travel and Tourism

Execution: A 3 million dollar campaign launched by Massachusetts Office of  Travel and Tourism directed to markets in the Northeast. The tagline of the campaign “Massachusetts. It’s all here” and the campaign was commissioned to a Boston based agency, Connelly Partners.

Description: The commercial spot is a few minute video that reuses much of last year video spot. It reminds a lot of the cartoons figures and story line of the 2007 “Is this New York City” video.

What We Like: the video is dynamic and flows from place to place without boring the viewer. It is not overloaded with tourist icons and has the right length. The spot is really well-packed graphically and has the ability to talk to a specific target market: outdoor travelers.

What We Don’t: Massachusetts looks more like an amusement park in the video. It seems to concentrate on a unique target market only. Perhaps there are other videos in the making. Also, it reminds too much of the New York City video. The video cannot be embedded. I am sure it is done on purpose, but Mass Tourism misses on a great viral marketing opportunity in the web 2.0 era.

Conclusions: A catchy campaign with a few opportunities missed.

I got across this interesting post that summarizes the latest trends and stats for travel in the online world.The impact of Twitter, mobile applications, etc… to name a few!

More at Travel 2.0

According to Travelmole, the majority of travel companies plan to increase or maintain online spend, according to a new survey. The poll of 88 companies, including airlines, agents, tour operators, hoteliers and shipping companies, found that eight out of ten intend to at least keep spending online.

More than half said they planned to increase budgets and a quarter said they expected online marketing budgets to rise by between 11% and 50%. Eleven out of 20 travel agencies plan to increase spending, with nine doing so by one to 50%. 40% of airlines planned to reduce spend by up to 10% while the remainder planned to increase their spend by varying degrees from 10% to more than 100%. Ten hotel companies responded, with only two decreasing budgets by one to 10% and one keeping it level. Of the seven who plan to increase their budgets, four will do so by one to 10%, two by 11-50% and one by more than 100%.

When asked what online priorities travel marketeers had, more than two thirds said they would increase spending on SEO (66%), half planned to increase destination content and 47% expected to increase spend on AdWords. But a fifth said they expected to reduce spend on banners and six out of ten expected metasearch spend to remain the same.

Unique content was a priority for 41% of the travel companies surveyed, which also reinforces the strong position of SEO as sites increasingly try to offer exclusive content to their customers and to search engines. User-generated content (34.8%) is the next priority for travel companies to add to their sites followed by video (28.3%), image galleries and marketing micro sites.

Delivering content over mobile and localising for non-English markets were the lowest priorities.

eMarketer’s latest projections, released in August, saw online advertising growing from $24.5 billion in 2008 to $28.5 billion in 2009. eMarketer benchmarks its online ad spending projections against quarterly reports by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which uses PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to conduct its surveys. For the first half of 2008, the IAB reported 15.2% growth for online ad spending, which is in line with eMarketer’s predictions.