MediaMind recently spoke to Mark Lomas, commercial director of Cadreon in Australia, about one of Australia’s first intent-based, geo-targeted campaigns for ZUJI, the Asia Pacific online travel retailer.


Q. Can you tell us about the ZUJI campaign?
A. ZUJI is a fast-growing online travel retailer operating in the Australian and Asia-Pacific market. Like all online travel retailers, it faces the constant challenge of trying to retain and grow market share in a fiercely competitive market. In travel, brand affinity tends to be low and consumers are price and intent-driven. When researching or buying travel products online, people typically search multiple websites and travel suppliers to find the best deal.

With this campaign, ZUJI wanted to keep its products and prices in front of users even after they left the ZUJI site. It also wanted to ensure it stayed highly relevant to users by serving them ads that matched their travel intentions right up to the point of purchase.



Q. What approach did you take?
A. Our approach was to create robust creative that matches user search-intent or interest intent. Working with MediaMind as a partner, we created a system that identifies and captures each user’s flight path intent when they visit the ZUJI site.

Say a consumer visits ZUJI and searches for a flight from Sydney to Las Vegas; we then tag them as a Las Vegas flight interest. If they leave the ZUJI site without making a purchase, we know they’re still interested in a Sydney to Las Vegas flight, so we continue to serve them ZUJI banners wherever we find them within the Cadreon network. By linking MediaMind technology with ZUJI’s own database, we can dynamically find the cheapest Sydney to Las Vegas flight deals currently available and insert those deals into the banner ad.


Q. What’s the reach of the Cadreon network?
A. Our network hits around 90 percent of the online Australian population. That means we can pretty much find most users, wherever they are.


Q. What’s the benefit of the advertising approach to consumers?
A. The consumer gets to see highly relevant, intent-based creative that helps them with their travel planning. Also, because we’re able to insert the very best flight deals available, the customer will receive the most up to date sale pricing. They simply click on the banner and go through to the ZUJI site to book the cheaper flight.


Q. How has the campaign gone?A. It’s gone incredibly well. ZUJI is seeing a significant increase in click-through-rates back to its site. And because we’re serving better, more relevant creative, conversion rates have spiked as well.


Q. How important is basket value to ZUJI?A. Beyond lowering the overall cost per acquisition, a major campaign objective for us has been to increase the basket or average order value for ZUJI. ZUJI calls this its ‘ROAS objective,’ where every dollar it spends on advertising must generate more than a dollar back.

With this campaign, we’re trying to close the gap between the cost per acquisition and the order value. For example, if ZUJI’s cost per acquisition is $50, but it’s only making $100 on that acquisition on a local domestic flight, no matter how many acquisitions we drive, it’s not going to help ZUJI grow. But if we can help ZUJI increase its average order value to $2000, it makes business sense.


Q. How do you go about increasing basket values?A. We track order or basket value when a user places an order and then use that information to optimize out low-performing sites. In a traditional display environment, you typically optimize on sites that deliver the most conversions, but you don’t know whether that conversion was for a low-value domestic flight or a $10,000 Barbados holiday. Using MediaMind technology, we’re able to track order value and see how much users are spending in certain environments. We can then optimize spend on sites that generate higher value travel purchases.


Q. Was the campaign technically challenging?
A. It was a little complicated as we had to set up a database-driven XML feed, make sure that feed was clean, and ensure the banners all linked to the right fields. We were also using dynamic database-driven content with geo-targeted messaging and mashing technologies together, so it was quite a challenging implementation for everyone. No one had ever done anything like this before in this market, so it was important that we got it right.


Q. Do you have any performance results?
A. I can’t discuss campaign results except to say ZUJI is extremely happy with how the campaign is going. Obviously, travel has very low product margins, so anything we can do technologically or creatively to improve click-through-rates and conversion-rates can yield significant returns for ZUJI – as this campaign is doing.


Q. Are there any improvements you’d like to introduce to the ZUJI campaign moving forward?
A. We’d gradually like to make it more granular and introduce advanced sequencing to go deeper into the consumer purchase funnel. For ZUJI, once a customer buys a flight to Vegas, we’d like to then serve deals to Vegas hotels or Vegas car rental or various deals for Vegas tours packages. It’s about how can we identify more user intent and serve cascading creative messages. If our first message is a branded message, the second should be a direct response message, the third a cross-sell or upsell and so on. So, it’s not only serving the right creative, but also serving it in the right sequence and timing.


Q. How did MediaMind contribute to the success of these campaigns?
A. MediaMind is great. One of the reasons we work with them is for the superior support they offer. We really couldn’t run these highly targeted, data-driven campaigns without that help and support.