• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 23, 2014

British Airways has appointed Forward3D to run its global paid-search campaigns. The account was formerly held by DigitasLBi, supported by British Airways internal marketing team. Reports suggest it had to resign the account due to its work with a rival airline.

Forward3D CEO Martin McNulty said the global business means running ads in multiple languages and countries. He declined to put a price tag on the annual business, but said some of the largest brands infuse millions of dollars in search budgets.

The agency tracks millions of keywords daily for a variety of clients, about 18 million just for Hilton Hotels. NcNulty said Forward3D will make some of BA's paid-search keyword trend data available to Aiyma, which handles the brand's search engine optimization business. "We can track the impact of their work and see the organic keywords driving conversions," he said. "There's isn't instant feedback in SEO, so it's kind of speculative. A good benchmark is to understand the paid-search cost for the same keyword."

Forward3D runs multilingual search and display marketing campaigns support more than 40 markets worldwide in about 60 languages. It's done through an international division called Locaria. The agency specializes in the retail and the travel markets, with fashion recently replacing travel as the biggest market served. Aside from Hilton Hotels, the agency supports clients like Gucci, John Lewis, Debenhams, The Net-A-Porter Group, and New Look.

The win comes a month after British Airways renewed its contract with Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) as the creative lead, as well as e-Dialog for email marketing. BBH will team up with Simon Hall and Warren Moore, owners of London e-commerce consultancy Seven Seconds, to form a joint venture.