Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

The Challenges
The MATTAFair is Malaysia’s largest travel fair. However, in 2017, with Emirates as the Official Airlines of the MATTAFair, MalaysiaAirlines (MAB) was barred from participating in the event. Given the importance of this sale period to MAB, our challenge was: without having any presence at the MATTAFair, how might we still win share-of-wallet among these travel deal-seekers?

Insight, Strategy and the Idea
Adopting a customer journey mapping approach, we profiled 2 types of MATTAFair visitors: (1) convenience-seeker who would park at the shopping mall across the road and (2) the LRT user, many of whom would cut through the mall, for convenience or refreshments – both of whom would find themselves in SunwayPutraMall. Understanding their journey-to-PWTC led to the simple idea: “Why not begin selling to these travel deal-seekers even before they reach PWTC?” This gave birth to our ambush marketing idea – the creation of our very own shadow travel fair: the MalaysiaAirlinesTravelFair (MATF), held in SunwayPutraMall..

Media Execution
The MATF, beyond appealing to their deal-hunting psyche – via discounted fares and a contest to stand a chance to win a MitsubishiOutlander – also drove on-ground excitement by: • Leveraging our sponsorship of the LiverpoolFootballClub, visitors had the opportunity to meet-and-play with LFC legend, John Arne Riise • Featuring Chinese opera performance which includes elements of music, acrobatics & magic to highlight our China destinations • Conducting the very first LIVE auction for Business Class air tickets to sought-after destinations like Beijing, Tokyo, and London, with bids starting from merely a few ringgit – conducted both on-ground and on Facebook Live.

Results and Effectiveness
Approx. 19,256 visitors over 3 days Travel agent sales during the March 2017 MATTA period, with the debut of MATF, was actually 19% higher compared to 2016 when MH actually had a brand pavilion within the MATTA fair itself! Source: Client data