Celebrity Cruises - celebrity Love Island
the brief_
Without doubt, the so-called ‘WAVE’ period is the most important time commercially for any cruise brand. This annual turn-of-year period accounts for around 20% of yearly booking revenue and is subsequently both very noisy and very competitive.
Celebrity Cruises came to us with three simple requirements:
• Without additional budget, increase engagement among the vitally important travel agent community and, subsequently, drive bookings during the WAVE period
• Reinforce Celebrity’s existing #CelebrityLovesAgents proposition, and raise excitement about the forthcoming launch of its first new ship in more than a decade, Celebrity Edge
• Dovetail to the wider WAVE platform and support achievement of the overall booked passenger and other commercial targets.
the approach_
We created a vehicle that would give us cut-through across the WAVE period, starting communications sooner than ever and slowly ramping up the excitement. We also exploited a more direct channel to the agents for the first time, with a ‘social first’ strategy underpinning our traditional outreach through travel trade media and the face-to-face work of the Celebrity sales team.
Exploiting the buzz around the 2017 series of ITV’s hit reality show Love Island, (and the obvious linguistic link to #CelebrityLovesAgents) we:
• Recruited four of the contestants as ‘Celebrity Love Island Ambassadors’
• Created a series of films that could be shared through the Celebrity Cruises UK Agent Facebook page to announce the WAVE campaign, reveal the various incentives available for top performing agents (including the chance to win a place on Edge when it launches, a personal visit by a Love Islander to the agent’s office or one of 35,000 spot prizes), and maintain hype through the whole WAVE period.
• Our campaign was announced via a teaser film broadcast through the Facebook page which built excitement without revealing the talent – and ensured Celebrity’s campaign was the only one they wanted to hear about.
• Talent was revealed in subsequent films, which combined our Love Islanders and members of the Celebrity trade sales team, and aired at the same time as exclusive launch interview articles were published in the key trade media.
Subsequent Love Islander-fronted films were drip fed throughout the WAVE period, with tips for making successful sales with Celebrity, reminding them of the various incentive prizes or generally just maintaining morale and hype. We even had Love Islanders making call outs to agents from the dedicated trade call centre.