airlines

Continental Airlines Gives Mobile Thumbs Up

by Tanya Gazdik , December 7, 2009

Continental mobile ads

Continental Airlines increased its ad awareness by 60% via a mobile campaign it ran this past summer, and is planning more mobile efforts as a result.

The Houston-based airline worked with Jumptap and Mediavest Worldwide to develop the campaign to promote its new reduced fares. The goal of the mobile campaign was to generate brand awareness and interest regarding the fare promotion and drive traffic to the Continental mobile site.

The campaign targeted a mobile Internet-savvy smartphone audience ages 25-54 with household income levels of $100,000 and higher. The target audience also had traveled for business within the last three months.

Jumptap ran graphical banners targeted to reach Continental's desired demographic audience across several of the former's premium network properties, including: MSNBC, NBA, NBC Sports and NBC Local Integrated Media, which geotargeted New York City mobile users.

The banners highlighted low fares and the convenience of using Continental's mobile-friendly Web site with copy such as: "Fares from $39 each way" and "Make continental.com your one-stop travel center."

Jumptap concurrently hosted an Insight Express brand study for Continental to measure user perception and awareness of the Continental brand in mobile, and to measure user purchase intent on the mobile Internet.

The study showed that the campaign was successful at driving increases across all brand metrics -- including Web site awareness, which was up 15.4%; overall purchase intent, which climbed 22.3%; and mobile purchase intent, which rose 22.2%.

The ads were based on yield management -- an approach to maximizing revenue when a business has a fixed, perishable resource and can segment customers into groups willing to pay different prices for the same resource. In airlines, a seat is "perishable" as the revenue potential disappears once the flight has flown.

"Airlines simply want to sell the right seat to the right passenger at the right time at the right price," Paran Johar, CMO of Jumptap, tells Marketing Daily. "What better medium [is there] than mobile to accomplish this objective?"

ad campaign, airlines, mobile

3 comments about "Continental Airlines Gives Mobile Thumbs Up ".

Check to receive email when comments are posted.

Kevin Horne from Verizon, December 8, 2009 at 11:42 a.m.
"Web site awareness, which was up 15.4%;"
Does that mean there were some people who had flown in the past three months who were NOT AWARE that Continental has a web site?
The mind reels...
Reply

Kelly Mcivor from Atomic Mobile, December 8, 2009 at 4:56 p.m.

Wait. They simply took a web-style marketing campaign and made it really tiny? I hope they stop doing this.

The novelty to users, who are testing just how much like a computer their smartphones are, may drive temporarily high response numbers which, will then drive similar behavior from other companies and marketers. But response numbers will fall as users quickly get numb to this familiar and largely irrelevant method.
Mobile marketing should capitalize on the medium recognising its personal and interactive nature and promoting time- or place-sensitive messages.

Howie Goldfarb from Blue Star Strategic Marketing, December 8, 2009 at 5:29 p.m.

Unless your a continental frequent flier for business most people shop for flights via an aggregating travel site so even if people know of continental price still wins almost all of the time. I used to fly a lot for work and patronized Southwest for short trips and American/Alaska for long hauls to consolidate mileage. But when I stopped traveling for work I would use Kayak or Yahoo to check fares and go with the best price unless it was very inconvenient.