With their captive audiences, airports are made for advertising. Here,
five companies explain how their campaigns worked for them. Richard Cook
reports
Thomas Cook
Lindsey Allardyce, marketing manager, Thomas Cook
As a global foreign exchange provider with more than 100 locations in 26
countries, a presence at major travel gateways is vital to get the
Thomas Cook brand name in front of thousands of travellers every day.
Airport advertising ensures the Thomas Cook name is one of the last seen
by passengers leaving the UK and one of the first by those arriving from
abroad.
Yet we can’t afford airport advertising to be just about brand
awareness. One of Thomas Cook’s objectives in advertising at gateway
sites is to channel passengers to its bureaux de change, so we have to
be creative about the way we use the medium.
Directional signage in strategic areas is key. Our Gatwick Express train
terminal site directs passengers off the train to the foreign exchange
bureau in the airport check-in. We have started to use foreign languages
on several sites, such as Japanese at Heathrow.
Nokia
Heikki Norta, general manager for marketing services, Europe and Africa,
Nokia
Last month we launched our combined mobile phone and personal organiser,
the Communicator, with a pan-European airport campaign centred around
exhibitions in terminals at Heathrow. There were exhibition stands in
the business lounges and at strategic points in the airports that gave
people the chance to test the product. Light boxes served as
directional signage to the launch exhibitions. While conventional
advertising helps to build awareness, touching and feeling the product
by taking it on a test run creates a genuine interest and generates the
desire to own one. So far we’ve had an extremely good response from our
core target of frequent business travellers.
Hertz
James Hogan, vice-president for marketing and sales, Hertz Europe
We launched our #1 Club Gold Service for business travellers with a big
multi-media campaign across Europe, and in the UK used TV and the
business press, and, for the first time, posters and airport
advertising. We wanted to achieve brand awareness and make as big an
impact as possible so we became the first advertiser to take the ads on
the tunnel leading in and out of Heathrow. We could have gone for sites
with less impact at more airports, but Heathrow is the busiest airport
in Europe.
Normally, either side of the tunnel is taken for between six months and
a year, but the opportunity arose for us to take both ends for a couple
of months. It’s too early to say what the effectiveness of these sites
will be but we want it to support the TV work and raise awareness among
businessmen.
Financial Times
Ben Hughes, worldwide advertisement director, Financial Times
We first became involved in airport advertising last year, to coincide
with the international expansion plans of the Financial Times. We wanted
a fairly standard campaign that would target the major airport sites
around Europe, but then we tried to add a more creative spin to the
media buying. We did this by making sure we tailored a campaign that was
located as near as possible to the international press shops. So far we
have set up advertising spots in Amsterdam, Madrid, Brussels and Lisbon,
with further sites planned in Frankfurt, Paris and Milan. The line of
the campaign is ‘read the world’, which promotes the FT’s strength as a
world business newspaper. But basically our airport campaign is doing
three main jobs for us. First of all, it serves as brand work for our
target audience, which is one that happens to travel on business a lot;
second, the proximity of the ads to the press shops helps boost our
retail sales, and third, the high-profile positions of the ads create an
awareness and presence that is important for our other sales
initiatives, and most notably, for bulk sales to the airlines
themselves.
Royal Sun Alliance
Peter Jackson, group marketing communications manager, Royal Sun
Alliance
We bought the biggest poster site in Europe, at Manchester Airport, and
used it to showcase our entire body of work. To be honest, we hadn’t
really thought about using airport advertising before we were offered
this opportunity, but the more we looked at it, the more we liked the
numbers. But it was still a more marginal choice than our TV and poster
work and we wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t available at the right
price. It looks good but it is difficult to measure any kind of
effectiveness, especially if you’re not doing a direct response
campaign, and you want to improve awareness and branding. We were more
than satisfied with the ‘you’d better ring the Royal’ campaign, which
gave us a profile after being unknown in real terms and put on ten
points in prompted recall and more than that in spontaneous awareness,
but it’s difficult to work out which part is responsible.
The problem with airport advertising, as with much other advertising, is
that so much of it is just wallpaper. People have to notice something
and take a second look for it to register.
At the very least our airport work is hard to ignore, if only because of
the size of it.
