How Citi's #TravelBigWithCiti campaign made their users’ wishes come true

They say, “Life is too short to stay in one place”, so we have to be travelling and exploring. There's so much on the bucket list – the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Northern Lights, and the floral wave of cherry blossoms in Japan! But soon, the reality kicks in to burst the bubble and we realise the account balance can't do much about feeding the wanderlust bug.

This is exactly where Citi stepped in and turned into a wish granting factory for its clients. With its brand new campaign called #TravelBigWithCiti, Citi released some amazing travel offers across flights, experiences, stay, shopping and duty free so that the BIG dream holiday plans could finally be executed.

To make sure the word reaches most users, Citi adopted a multilayered promotion strategy starting with offer awareness.

To generate awareness, the traditional OOH was augmented with intelligent use of analytics for targeting on Digital. Citi leveraged TV2Mobile targeting to engage with users across multiple screens. By identifying users who watched TVCs of the campaign partners, and then chasing them on their smartphone, it yielded higher awareness and recall for the offers!

Citi was present on Trip Advisor well on time - to build consideration from the research phase itself. The campaign was made even more relevant by going highly specific on location, and what better context than airports to target travel enthusiasts.

The second layer of the campaign was all about brand engagement on social. To bring the idea of a dream holiday alive, Citi designed a very interesting web app with newsfeed where users could pick a dream destination and upload a selfie and Voila! The application created a personalized future travel video that could be posted on social media. That’s bringing dreams to reality for 600 participants.

As a part of the campaign, a fun activity was carried out on social media wherein the users were invited to share their #ImperfectToPerfect travel stories where things didn’t go as planned, yet made a memorable trip. Great idea on social media and a popular hashtag is the key to spreading the word across and the results were well in favour of the brand with over 200 entries including some really heartwarming tales and over 395,000 likes, shares, and comments.

Citi also took the influencer-led marketing route with Curly Tales leveraging their travel-loving and highly-engaged audience base. This was done by integrating Citi travel offers seamlessly in videos by Curly Tales featuring domestic & international destinations. Advertorials were also integrated across platforms to drive unique reach & awareness.

As with any successful campaign, the proof of the pudding is in the business drivers. To drive card usage, Citi enabled offer discovery for clients on Google, Gmail, YouTube, and Facebook via custom match. This was done using a mix of creative devices – videos, carousals, canvas ads and even 360 degree photos to engage customers. Citi customers who were travelling abroad to the popular destinations were presented with offers applicable in the country they were visiting! This was done using custom audience combined with IP targeting on Facebook. Imagine Citi clients travelling to Russia to witness the FIFA world cup, get to know of dining & shopping privileges on their card in Russia. The result? An impressive 2.8% click-through rate on Google (2x the industry standard) and 1% on Facebook (2x the industry standard).

The brilliantly formulated, conceptualized and executed campaign garnered a great response as the total card spends went up by 6% in Q2 vs Q1 with travel category rising by 9% in the same period. The card spends for select partner campaigns rose by as high as 36% compared to Q1 average daily spend in some cases. The campaign garnered total of 10 million video views, registered 70 million impressions and led to 5,80,000 clicks! The campaign was surely successful in generating buzz and stood by its core proposition to #TravelBigWithCiti.