Weather triggered DOOH drives 40% uplift in bookings for Norse’s new routes

The Challenge

As a fast-growing airline, Norse is continuously adding new routes to its portfolio. To ensure planes are filled to maximum capacity when the route launches, Norse’s target audience must be made aware of the new destinations on offer far in advance.

At the start of 2024, Norse launched flights to winter sun routes: Jamaica, Barbados and LA. With these routes already having substantial competition and a high seasonality trend, Norse challenged Impression to drive awareness of its new routes to a highly relevant audience.

The Strategy

To help shape our strategy, we set out to determine what inspires people to travel.

Our research showed that some are inspired by idyllic social media depictions, others take recommendations from friends and family, and some are looking to escape bad weather.

Knowing that bad weather is a key driver of holiday bookings, we determined that Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) activity would allow us to reach our audience at the most poignant moment – when they are outside experiencing it.

1

We designed a weather-reactive strategy using the two most common weather conditions for January and February in the vicinity of Norse’s home airport - rain and cloud. The messaging would acknowledge the current weather conditions and encourage our audience to ‘ditch their wellies’ in favour of the warm weather in the new travel destinations.

2

We chose StackAdapt as our DSP, as their in-platform weather segments simplified the targeting, and they were able to support with the creative build allowing us to run 6 variations in total - one for each destination and weather combination.

3

A mobile retargeting strategy ran in tandem; identifying users primed by our DOOH ads based on device proximity at the time the ad impression was shown, then targeting their device ID to encourage them to click through to the Norse site and continue their journey.

4

To ensure Norse had a disruptive, targeted presence across multiple environments, this strategy ran in conjunction with audio spots on Spotify and high impact display across premium sites via GumGum. With additional data segments available through these partners, we split out our audience into Winter Sun Chasers and LA Jetsetters with tailored creatives per audience. Spotify leveraged highly indexing podcasts and playlists, while GumGum targeted highly indexing content and sites, as well as premium Hearst titles for the LA Jetsetters audience.

The Results

There was a clear indication that Norse’s audience was primed by the DOOH activity. The mobile retargeting activity achieved a CTR 90% higher than the travel vertical display benchmark, suggesting that exposure to the DOOH activity increased the likelihood of engaging with the following mobile display activity.

This effect was enhanced by proximity to the DOOH ad – we observed the highest CTR lift (+17%) when the user passed within 50m of the DOOH placement, with the uplift reducing at 100m+.

These results clearly show that DOOH brand activity has a halo effect on online media, driving engagement amongst primed audiences.

GumGum’s brand lift results:

50%

of people said they would take action after seeing the ad

40%

uplift in searches and bookings for Norse’s compared to the pre-advertising period, helping Norse achieve their wider business goal

11%

increase in brand awareness

6%

increase in consideration

Working with Impression Digital is a real pleasure. Their friendly, proactive nature and ability to quickly grasp and respond to our unique challenges as a new and evolving brand in an extremely competitive environment has strengthened our relationship to a true partnership.

Helen Astroulakis Digital Campaign Manager, Norse Atlantic Airways

Working with Impression Digital in collaboration with StackAdapt has assisted us to create impactful and innovative campaigns that resonate with our audience, driving greater awareness and consideration for our airline.

Helen Astroulakis Digital Campaign Manager, Norse Atlantic Airways

Working with Impression Digital is a real pleasure. Their friendly, proactive nature and ability to quickly grasp and respond to our unique challenges as a new and evolving brand in an extremely competitive environment has strengthened our relationship to a true partnership.

Helen Astroulakis Digital Campaign Manager, Norse Atlantic Airways