Word reaches us that Kayak‘s first ever national US television advertising campaign will air this weekend.
The metasearch giant will simultaneously launch an outdoor schedule to feature in such exotic – and expensive – locations as New York’s Times Square.
The company is not releasing any of the creative ahead of when the ads are broadcast and unveiled on Saturday.
It is understood that filming for the TV ads took place in Los Angeles and is different from the local TV ads that were aired over a six-week trial earlier this year on local networks around the US.
Although the timing of the campaign isn’t an enormous surprise given that many travel firms begin to ramp up their marketing activity now ahead of Thanksgiving in the US, Christmas holidays and summer 2010 planning, Kayak’s distribution of the activity into new advertising channels is an interesting development.
Relying primarily on online ads, PPC and word-of-mouth to spread its message over the years, Kayak will be entering uncharted waters with two of the most unmeasurable media channels available – TV and outdoor.
The latest approach mirrors that of its rival in the UK, TravelSupermarket, which in 2007 unveiled a massive TV advertising campaign in what was a significant and, many say, successful branding exercise.
Nevertheless, throwing millions of marketing funds into TV advertising is a risky strategy and has been well known in the past to do more damage to a brand than was intended (most often as a result of the creative work).
Kayak says the TV adspots and outdoor creative will only be used in the US. It coincides with the recent overhaul of the Kayak logo and introduction of a new features such as Kayak Trends.
NB: Interestingly, TravelSupermarket launched its series of ads about six months before its own IPO/public listing in July 2008.
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Is advertising on tv really a risky strategy? From a brand awareness point of view it is only good. From a brand perception point of view yes, it can be bad, but surely only rarely.
It is fairly critical that online platforms such as kayak build some kind of lasting interaction with the public. (I’m classify anything which doesn’t have a physical product or a tangible service interaction as a platform). If not, as soon as the next best solution comes along there is little loyalty. IMHO this is why traditional companies survive for decades whilst online platforms (e.g. friendsreunited, yahoo and arguably now myspace) seem to have extraordinary success followed by waning popularity in such a relatively short time.
Whether TV advertising does the job for online platforms, I don’t know. If anybody has any stats it would be fascinating to see. It is certainly my experience that offline advertising converts poorly to online action. Done properly though, brand building could work.
Kayak apparently has search volume on par with major travel brands like Orbitz, but Kayak’s brand recognition pales in comparison. The offline ad campaign is geared to rectify that disparity.
And, hey, the exposure shouldn’t hurt Kayak’s IPO prospects, right?
It’s important to see this as one tactic within an overall communication strategy, and not make a direct comparison to PPC campaigns (just as comparing reach of PPC ads to TV would be similarly fruitless.)
Personally, I think this is a brilliant move given Kayak’s largest challenge is explaining to consumers what they actually do. TV gives them a platform to articulate their benefits and value proposition in a way that 2 lines of text on Google simply can’t provide (not to compare TV and PPC again, of course…)
For anyone interested in seeing our new ads, the first one airs during the 4:15pm EST NFL football game on Fox. They should be available on youtube shortly thereafter.
Priceline has been advertising on TV for years (at least here in the States) mostly using bizarro ex-Star Trekkie William Shatner as its spokesperson.
It would be a difficult argument to make that Priceline’s TV ads did not have an impact on its branding, and ultimately on its business. They took something as obscure as opaque merchandising and made it understandable and weirdly funny at the same time.
Done well, TV advertising could be a massive boost for Kayak. We’ll see how it works out for them.
Personally, as an American, I understood the Cancun reference, although the actor struck me as a bit old (he was the actor whose grandfather-character just dropped dead on Mad Men) – when he was in his 20s, Cancun was just a bunch of shacks on a beautiful beach.
One of the elements that made Priceline TV advertising noticeable besides the approach was the sustained effort. To get noticed in this saturated medium requires more than brief campaigns but months, even years of exposure. Much too early to tell if Kayak can pull it off.
As for the character in the Cancun ad, he has to be of that “greatest generation” age group as he talks about a WWII “storming the beach” experience. What the actual connection with Cancun is, remains for the audience to interpret – maybe he remembers a conquest of another kind, who knows!
The “Storming the Beach” ad itself is offensive. The speaker in the ad is old enough to be of a generation which stormed a beach in Korea, or to have seen combat in Vietnam, and with a stetch of the imagination, maybe he’s old enough to be someone who could have stormed a beach during WW2 when beach landings were common, but it is hard to imagine that someone that has experienced combat, or especially, has stormed a beach would base a parody on such, so the viewer eventually realizes that the speaker in this ad is someone that despite his age, avoided serving in our worst, most recent wars. Is he a draft dodger, or one of the elite who won’t serve but find the service of others something to make fun of? While they stormed beaches under fire, was he partying as the ad suggests. It’s in bad taste, at best.
We find this absolutely an offensive advertisement. Humor of this sort while the country is at war and a mocking of “The Greatest Generation” then shame on the marketing team. At first I thought the add to be a serious gesture where a Korean War Era vet was using the site to go face a location of terrible memories to make peace with it. That would have been a wonderful ad but instead it was a parody and a shallow joke of terrible things that our vets endured. Shame on you Kayak. Shame on you.
The old saying in TV advertising was that the empty cereal box makes the sale. Kayak, like other OTAs, have a customer database that enables them to detect when their best customers are more likely to be making their travel decisions…while the economy has made it easier than ever to place ads in key travel markets without paying a usurious penalty for last-second placement. It’s like having your own in-house Nielsen people meters!
While I was skeptical when I first saw the story on Kayak, after reading more about their agency (Goodby Silverstein) and their media plan, I’m much more sanguine about their prospects.