Travelex

Sponsorship of ITV's 2002 football World Cup website

Travelex is the world’s largest non-bank provider of commercial foreign exchange services, and also the world's second largest issuer of traveller's cheques.

Travelex has more than 650 retail branches at key airport, seaport and rail locations, in addition to tourist and business centres around the world. Around 40% of the world's airline passengers - over 1.3 billion people - pass through airports at which the business operates, including the major gateways at London, New York, Hong Kong, Paris, Frankfurt and Sydney.

"The sponsorship worked tremendously well in not only generating awareness of the brand, but also in explaining what Travelex was about."

LIDA, part of the M&C Saatchi village

Travelex was looking to raise the profile of its brand and promote awareness of the wide range of Travelex products and services within the business and consumer markets.

Travelex wanted to be associated with a trusted brand around the largest television and sports event of 2002 - the football World Cup. The integrated broadcast and web coverage meant that this was the internet event of 2002, with heavily branded on-air site URL promotion.

Broadcast coverage of comprehensive highlights, reviews and previews and full interaction with the World Cup target audience meant that itv.com/worldcup offered a large, young and upmarket audience.

The ITV World Cup sponsorship presented the ideal opportunity to communicate what Travelex was and what it did, and to clarify that it was the largest foreign exchange specialist in the world.

The campaign idea centred on ‘World Cup Firsts’. By using the pay-off ‘First name for foreign exchange’, Travelex was able to close the loop, explaining the link between World Cup Firsts and Travelex's position in the market.

This sponsorship offered opportunities such as:

• Integrated site branding
• Travelex content strand
• Exclusive competitions and games
• Integrated online and on-air competitions
• Branded on-air URL promotion
• Targeted Travelex data capture
• Advertiser content banners and buttons

The ITV World Cup sponsorship was the single largest brand-building activity undertaken by Travelex in the UK. Apart from the general high level of brand awareness generated, it also formed the background to a number of other World Cup promotional activities in both the corporate and retail sectors.

The sponsorship helped drive customer numbers and incremental revenue at Travelex’s airport bureaux, and also provided valuable support to the sales effort within its corporate payments business. In a financial services business such as Travelex’s, brand recognition is an important component of building customer trust and reliance. The sponsorship met and exceeded the company’s objectives in this respect. An added benefit was the pride and sense of purpose it provided to Travelex employees.

ITV online sponsorship research found:

The percentage of respondents who are aware of Travelex online:

• Pre-branding 25%
• Post-branding 45%

The percentage of respondents who would consider using Travelex online:

• Pre-branding 64%
• Post-branding 70%

The percentage of respondents who agreed that Travelex is a trustworthy brand:

• Pre-branding 35%
• Post-branding 50%

The website statistics showed:

• Page impressions per month: 8 million
• Unique users per month: 720,000

Site demographics:

• 46% male aged 18-34
• 18% female aged 18-34