Wizz Air

Brand lift-off! - Reaching for the sky with YouTube Brand Lift for Wizz Air

Wizz Air is Europe’s fastest-growing ultra-low-cost airline, powered by a team of dedicated aviation experts. With a modern fleet of over 200 aircraft, it leads the industry in environmental sustainability. Serving nearly 1,000 routes across 200 destinations in over 50 countries, Wizz Air’s diverse team, representing more than 100 nationalities, is committed to delivering affordable travel worldwide.

The Challenge

Wizz Air, one of Europe’s leading ultra-low-cost airlines, constantly seeks innovative ways to engage its audience. In the highly competitive travel market, maximising reach and awareness is vital, and every impression matters.

To ensure the brand stays top-of-mind when customers book travel, it’s crucial to communicate their message early in the customer journey. With this goal, Wizz Air launched a brand campaign focused on more than just reach and views, aiming to understand how their advertising shaped customer perceptions.

Wizz Air partnered with Impression to run a Fall campaign designed to boost awareness ahead of the winter travel season. Impression recommended YouTube as a key channel, as it was the second most popular platform for their audience after Facebook, with 60% regularly consuming content there. This approach also enabled Brand and Search Lift measurement, providing valuable insights into how the campaign influenced customer behaviour from awareness to conversion.

The Strategy

Wizz Air’s primary goal was to enhance brand awareness in three key growth markets: Italy, Poland, and the UK.

To achieve this, we planned a multi-channel strategy prioritising YouTube to deliver instream, bumper and in-feed video ads, targeting budget travellers and users in-market for travel to Wizz destinations. YouTube activity activated via DV360 allowed us to measure the impact of our performance beyond in-platform metrics by unlocking Brand Lift and Search Lift studies.

As well as YouTube, our multi-channel campaign included open exchange display activity focused on reaching audiences interested in budget travel and browsing competitors, to extend the campaign’s reach. We also leveraged Spotify to engage consumers with audio content and unlock an additional opportunity for Brand Lift measurement.

We hypothesised that conducting Brand Lift & Search Lift studies would provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of our campaigns. This information will help us make informed decisions regarding our campaign strategy for the client moving forward.

Test results

Throughout these tests, we gained valuable insights into our performance, revealing that our YouTube ads are positively influencing searches for key search terms across the Google ecosystem. Overall, we observed an increase in brand awareness across 2/3 key markets, particularly among female audiences and older demographics.

Brand lift

The YouTube campaign drove a significant uplift in Brand Lift metrics across two of our three key markets. In Italy, we saw a 17% increase in brand awareness among audiences interested in travel destinations, while in Poland, ad recall lifted by an impressive 30%.

We also observed some intriguing market-specific nuances. In Poland, older demographics showed a stronger response, with ad recall among the 65+ age group rising by 42%, compared to their younger counterparts. Meanwhile, in Italy, the awareness lift was 20% higher among females than males, highlighting distinct audience motivations across the two regions.

Search lift

Search lift was detected in all markets, showing that exposure to the YouTube ad resulted in increased search behaviours. The UK saw the highest lift in searches for the terms ‘Wizz’ and ‘Wizz Air’, boasting an overall lift of 39%. This trend was also supported by the findings in Italy and Poland which saw a search lift of 25% and 15% respectively.

Similarly to the Brand Lift results, we saw the strongest lifts amongst the female demographic and within older demographics, indicating that these groups are the most receptive to YouTube advertising.