Summary

In a world of short term thinking, we helped icelolly.com focus on long term brand building to supercharge their business. 

Through a unique outcomes-based partnership we helped them create their biggest business impact, increasing their overall user sessions to 25m in one of the most challenging climates in recent history for the travel and holiday category. 

Against a backdrop of declining website traffic across the category (down by 20% at its peak), we helped drive an additional 5m sessions to site, growing revenue by 60% in 2019.

In partnership with ITV, icelolly.com focussed on building their brand and driving search and user sessions using a mix of spot and targeted programme sponsorships.  

A shared risk and reward framework transformed the way we worked together and demonstrated how ITV are supporting brands to grow. We moved from a transactional media owner relationship to a strategic business partner.
 

The business challenge: To buck the trend of declining visitors

Despite being the UK’s fastest growing holiday comparison website in 2018, icelolly.com was not immune to the travel category’s downturn during its traditional peak period in January 2019.  The impact of ongoing Brexit uncertainty on consumer confidence and currency volatility with the pound, combined with the lingering memory of 2018’s summer heatwave caused a series of difficulties for the travel industry in overseas travel.

The ITV insight:

Icelolly were operating in a highly competitive environment, going up against a plethora of well established, trusted and well known brands. They were also coming from a standing start. 

Thinking broadly about the ITV universe and how we could work as expansively as possible with Icelolly, we realised we could offer the brand some salience, inject it with meaning and lend it some trust, all super quick. These were the three things that Icelolly really needed grow user sessions and ITV was the perfect partner to deliver them. 

How ITV helped:

icelolly.com needed an understanding business partner who would support a test and learn approach not an inflexible media trader.  We worked flexibly with icelolly.com supporting the icelolly team on media strategy, financial planning and performance metrics, moving us from a transactional exchange to a more focussed business partnership. This allowed us to directly react to what was happening within the broader category and move their weight of spend to where it would be most effective to drive sessions – testing dayparts, shows, audiences and regionality all measured through a shared dashboard. This is a great example of an ambitious, fast growth brand working closely with ITV and seeing significant growth as a result.  

The idea:  Daily holiday nudges

The overall brand building partnership is underpinned by a combination of high profile sponsorships including Family Guy and American Dad daily on ITV2, Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on ITV main channel and bolstered with spot airtime delivering the call to action.

Their idents are contextually linked into the shows, such as featuring hapless cartoon characters for Family Guy, and linking their “Do it for the Stories” with Piers Morgan’s Life Stories.

What happened:

• Increased revenue by 45% in a broader travel market that was down 20% at points.

• Quarterly analysis by Hitwise showed that Icelolly outperformed the category, and doubled their visitor numbers in the period Jan-Apr 2019

• Moved icelolly.com up the rankings within the travel agency category based on number of visits from 25th to 16th.

• Increased icelolly.com’s share of search by +37% within the category. 

• Delivered the highest proportion of package bookers to site visitors among its main competitors in the period (Hitwise)

• Increased spontaneous brand awareness by 40% and grew prompted awareness to 50%. 

• ITV tracked icelolly.com’s growing share of voice across the campaign period and matched the delivery of impacts against website traffic peaks with our partner, Hitwise to prove the partnership was driving website traffic.

Our top 3 takeouts:

• ITV is prepared to be more flexible and entrepreneurial than ever in our approach to partnership 

• Brand building partnerships on ITV at scale also drive immediate behavioural results, even in a challenging climate.

• icelolly.com continues to prove the rule that increasing a brand’s share of voice also leads to an increase in its share of market.

It could be your business next, and we hope it is. ITV's Business for All initiative is for organisations looking to take that first step into the world of TV advertising. With matched funding, unrivalled reach across ITV's channels and support creating your perfect ad; Business For All offers brands the chance to supercharge their growth. 

Sound like the right opportunity for you? Get in touch with Jason.Spencer@itv.com for more information.