Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

The Challenge
MalaysiaAirline’s road to recovery was fraught with both internal & external challenges.. The company underwent Restructuing & leadership changes with budget & route cuts; also faced aggressive competition. LCCs pushed their ‘low fares’ & HybridAirlines’ highlighted ‘Full Service @ LCC pricing’. We were tasked to drive sales & protect SOM.

Insight, Strategy and the Idea
Despite being besiged on all fronts MalaysiaAirlines still boasted of unrivalled destinations with industry best flight frequency. Our strategy hinged on driving last mile conversion & ensuring business profitability by increasing passenger load across routes. We analysed flight occupancy data across routes in next 90 days. Destinations with more than 40% unsold inventory & higher value were prioritised. For these routes, we increased the bid cap by 50% compared to other ad groups, ensuring top spot on Google Search Engine for brand and destination keywords.

Media Execution
Agency deployed three-pronged strategy capturing potential consumer’s intent. We started with Always On Search strategy with 100% SOV on Brand + Destination keywords; coupled with Geo-Targeting of Federal Territory which contributed to 60% of traffic, thus plugging spillage to competitors. With Real time conversion based fluid bidding strategy, we hijacked competitor keywords and redirected potential travelers to MalaysiaAirlines, while maintaining 60-40 split between competitor & travel agents to cover all bases. Finally we deployed Recency & Frequency Modelling to optimise campaign driving higher ROI. We served different messages based on a). Recency- Dropping out at the payment page. b). Number of times a person (cookie) searched for a particular destination within 30 days. This helped in understanding the intent better with customized display ads & re-targeting them on search ads.

Results and Effectiveness
A unique search approach yielded strong results with 30% Campaign ROI increase YOY. Effective competitor targeting drove 91% new website visits increasing online conversion from 7% to 9% & additional 11% reduction in CPA in Q1.