Icelandair had two problems.
First, “After the pandemic, that they had to change numerous flight routes due to border rules,” said Anjlee Majmudar, VP of programmatic, for the airline’s digital marketing partner Brainlabs North America. As a result “that they had difficulty ensuring that each one of the seats were filled. Not only booking flights but ensuring that each one the seats throughout the flights were filled and fully optimized.”
And second, “In Iceland, we’re one in every of the largest corporations within the country,” said Jóhann Benediktsson, digital marketing manager, Icelandair. “In the markets where most of our marketing takes place, we’re a quite small player with a budget that’s a fraction of what our competitors have. So every dollar counts.”
In short, they needed to maximize bookings without spending numerous money. They selected an unusual channel for this: programmatic promoting. Up until then, the corporate had put most of its efforts into search and social media.
Dig deeper: Bid shading costing advertisers $6.6 billion yearly
Programmatic drawbacks
“Programmatic is type of the shotgun method, where you’re trying to reach a big enough audience to construct brand awareness,” said Benediktsson. “It has a much lower level of clicks and in addition a low level of conversions per click.”
But Brainlabs saw a possibility there — a likelihood to connect with a recent audience and do it after they were deciding to travel. The very first thing they wanted to do was move beyond individuals who were going to book a flight anyway. What they wanted were people in the next income bracket, showing intent to travel and in addition travel internationally. That meant including business travelers and searching beyond individuals who were trying to find Icelandair organically.
However, using programmatic in the same old way — getting a brand’s name and value proposition in front of numerous people — wasn’t going to cut it. Brainlabs wanted to do that in a way that delivered on the one KPI that mattered: bookings.
That required getting dynamic creative in front of the specified audience at the appropriate moment. And that isn’t any easy thing to do. So Brainlabs turned to its tech partner, Scibids. Using AI, Scibids makes it possible to use DSPs’ custom bidding function.
Custom bidding models
“When you set an AI provider like Scibids over the bid function, we’re able to create custom bidding models which can be buying on behalf of that advertiser and the advertiser only,” said Nadia Gonzalez, CMO of Scibids, a DoubleVerify company. “So it’s not your kind of off-the-shelf optimization that a DSP would offer for you, which is great for many advertisers. But if you happen to want to take things to the following level, like Icelandair, you would like the flexibility to say I would like an end result or a KPI that’s not present in the DSP.
“They wanted to maximize online flight bookings at the bottom cost,” she added. “This just isn’t easy to do because whenever you’re the funnel of where to buy from, the highest of the funnel down to the conversion, you’ve to get numerous data and numerous information from what you’re seeing online.”
Anjlee Majmudar said two things were essential in executing this campaign:
- Have a really detailed audience framework before implementing AI or machine learning. That way you understand who the audience is, and that enables you to take full advantage of those capabilities.
- Close partnership with the strategy and planning teams so as to capture the intent signals that discover who Icelandair’s next best audience goes to be.
“The challenge was really around ensuring that the audience and the bidding match together,” said Majmudar. “That’s what we saw because the secret sauce. Leveraging automation and AI we were able to find that combination and the permutation much quicker since it was consistently ingesting that knowledge and people signals when it comes to when, when that user was, was about to take motion.”
Bookings take flight
Icelandair OK’d a test run in 11 markets and a couple of weeks later, when it saw the outcomes are available in, expanded this system to all its programmatic.
“We’re seeing more direct effects of our media spend in programmatic on flight bookings,” said Benediktsson. “One result’s lower cost per transaction so we get more out of it. Now we will be more flexible when it comes to how we distribute our budgets.”
In more concrete terms that’s meant a 70% decrease in cost per flight booking over the past yr. “This level of efficiency represents a 10x ROI for the brand compared to the benchmark price of applying artificial intelligence ourselves,” said Benediktsson.
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