After a successful year of working with Ant & Dec as our newly recruited Happiness Ambassadors in 2023, we welcomed them back last year where they joined our customers & colleagues on a TUI holiday in Majorca, one of our best-selling destinations. The overall goal was to drive brand love for TUI by reinforcing us as the most trusted travel provider who creates incredible memories, going above & beyond for our customers. Our campaign strategy saw an emotive integration of ‘Why choose TUI’ messaging, creating a halo effect to drive brand love and shifting intent & preference through emotional connections with the audience.
Instagram was our chosen publishing platform, strategically picked due to high awareness base lines for TUI and presence of our heartland audiences. This also meant we could align with Ant & Dec’s strongest social platform, boasting 5.3M followers and famous for content series’ such as Jungle Club and Taste Mates.
Adopting learnings from our 2023 activation, we optimised the campaign on both Ant & Dec and TUI channels to collaboratively drive results, ensuring our content played to each channel’s strengths and listened to the needs of the two audiences. Content for Ant & Dec’s channel was entertaining & playful, following similar formats to previous content series to build on authenticity and familiarity with their audience. Content for TUI channels focused on bringing our love for our customers & colleagues to the forefront, highlighting reactions & behind the scenes moments.
Reflecting on our learnings & results from Year 1 allowed us to build a strategic approach to a successful Year 2. In our first year, there was no strategy for TUI channels which meant the same content was used for both Ant & Dec and TUI, but we noticed that engagement on TUI’s Instagram was highest when customer interaction was involved. Shooting in the UK also meant it was hard to demonstrate the TUI offering and land natural branding queues, and a longer posting window meant the storytelling was harder to convey.
Therefore, our Year 2 approach was about helping the TUI audience to understand the ‘why’ behind the partnership. We demonstrated our expertise through our people and worked closely with Meta to optimise placements to drive best performance. Our posting window was shortened to 16 days to create a strong, interactive narrative across content that felt organic to the audience and made playful use of platform features. Thes shoot took place in Majorca, one of our most popular destinations for repeat TUI customers, and our content strategy highlighted the key touchpoints of a TUI holiday, from getting your airport transfer to voting for the best plate of food at the all-inclusive buffet.
As our Happiness Ambassadors, Ant & Dec collaborated with TUI staff to showcase how we go above & beyond for our customers to make each moment of their holiday memorable. Whilst Ant & Dec’s Instagram focused on entertaining audiences, TUI content was more simply executed to drive more specific key messaging and give an exclusive look into what Ant & Dec get up to on a TUI holiday. We posted our content in July with paid amplification running in August, heightening the emotional connection during the summer holidays and putting TUI front of mind ahead of a key sales period in September.
We used a mix of Instagram Reels, In-Feed and Stories to convey the moments that we share on our social channels when we’re on holiday. Our In-Feed posts followed the theme of a ‘photo dump’, gathering highlights from the trip for Ant & Dec and interactions with our customers & colleagues for TUI. Instagram Stories were used to drive engagement, using features such as polls & stickers to encourage audience interaction. Instagram Reels amplified storytelling of memorable moments for our customers, aligning with our goal of emotional connection.
To align with best practice and ensure content stayed authentic, we dedicated time & resource to producing bespoke TUI props to aid ad recall. Items such as branded Hawaiian shirts for Ant & Dec, branded life jackets for paddleboarding and smaller items such as clipboards, lanyards & towels all helped keep the focus on the story, whilst conveying TUI as a fun & playful brand.
Our campaign was extended with paid amplification, with the goal of making further builds for intent & preference and targeting more premium users who are more likely to engage with the content.
For Year 2 we conducted another brand lift study with Meta, focused on making further builds for intent & preference. Our second cell optimised towards a video views objective, achieved +24.1pts in ad recall, +3.7pts in intent and +4.3pts in preference. When we compare this to YoY results, that’s +474% higher ad recall, +42% higher intent and +8% higher preference.
A total of 5.67M impressions for organic content resulted in 78.1% positive sentiment on Ant & Dec’s channels, along with 53.94% positive sentiment on TUI channels, up 5.76% vs benchmark. TUI’s introduction post resulted in 90% positive sentiment, one of our best performing posts for 2024 and up 76.4% vs benchmark.
Press coverage resulted in 11 pieces of organic coverage, all from reactive content from our customers who spotted Ant & Dec in resort. This resulted in a lot of pre-campaign buzz, with over a quarter of follow up coverage featuring the campaign content.
During the June-August period, a study with MetrixLab showed that Ant & Dec generated 5% of all user-generated comments related to TUI. 16% of comments mentioned TUI directly, with 21% finding the content funny and 48% expressing love directly.
Our campaign delivered 103,053 page views to the TUI website, with viewers of Ant & Dec’s content reaching the highest number of views and spending longer on the website. In addition to website visits, Ant & Dec’s link also generated two bookings, which is a notable achievement when running a campaign based on awareness & consideration objectives.
