Background | Consultancy | Poster Advertising | Achieving Cut-Through | Gay Relevant Advertising | The Campaign Itself
Click here to listen to an interview broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live
Background | Consultancy | Poster Advertising | Achieving Cut-Through | Gay Relevant Advertising | The Campaign Itself
Click here to listen to an interview broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live
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Amro Worldwide is seven years strong and has carved a leading edge niche in the specialist expertise of 'gay travel'. There are many things that make a holiday, and Amro Worldwide, 'gay'. The most important thing of course is our customers and the trust they place in Amro Worldwide. Amro is ATOL bonded, and offers clients the flexibility to 'order' up their next holiday online with Amro Collection -- or take advantage of the extensive knowledge of Amro's personal travel consultants via the Amro A La Carte service. Another important thing that makes Amro different is that Amro management has personally stayed with every property they sell. So clients benefit from Amro gay travel. Tried, and trusted. As a result of a series of Focus Groups held in London, Brighton and Manchester, Amro identified that its brand recognition amongst the gay and lesbian community was poor. Those who recognised the brand spoke highly of the holidays that Amro created and indeed, Amro enjoys a particularly high level of repeat business. However with changes in both the players in the UK Gay & Lesbian Travel industry and the increasing use of the Internet as the preferred purchasing channel, Amro felt the need to increase its overall awareness to a wider audience was an essential to driving continued growth. Outdoor or Poster advertising is rarely considered economic for niche market advertising, but Amro floated the idea of a highly targeted campaign on the London Underground to several US Tourism Boards in October 2007 and received a very positive response. The idea was then developed that a number of partners be found to contribute to the overall cost of a campaign which would feature destinations but with a “call to action” being to visit the Amro Worldwide website page and to either book on line or have your travel created by a specialist consultant. Destination partners would benefit by having exposure as part of the campaign at a far lower cost than proceeding individually. At the same time, opportunities were investigated to coincide with London Pride (5 July 2008) when it was felt that large numbers of the G&L market would see the advertising. Unfortunately, there is limited opportunity for Outdoor and Poster advertising in Central London so the London Underground was chosen as a suitable site. After enquiries, space was booked on the Escalator at Leicester Square Underground Station and the Lifts at Covent Garden Underground Station – two stations extensively used by G&L clients both on the day of London Pride and in the normal course of accessing popular G&L bars and clubs in Central London. Costs for the campaign were calculated and it was decided to seek five destination partners, ideally those attractive to the G&L market but not stereotype destinations. Within two weeks, Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Washington DC had confirmed participation and two weeks later South Carolina joined to become a sixth partner. |
At this stage and after reflection, Amro felt that both the size, complexity and the number of destination partners involved meant that professional expertise was required to manage the campaign. In January 2008, Amro appointed Out Now Consulting as the managers of the campaign. |
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Advertising a Gay Travel Company on posters presents particular challenges to the designer:
This is achieved by adopting a strategy of positioning the various partner destinations and the Amro brand as being strongly supportive of lesbian and gay people. |
Out Now carried out field research into how best to achieve cut-through on LU advertising. It found that achieving this on LU escalator and lift panels presents a number of unique obstacles:
Below left is an example of the 25 poster space Amro has taken on both the up and down side escalators at Leicester Square station for the campaign. This view shows around 20 posters as an example of the challenge of clutter. Out Now considered that the type of advertising that cuts through most effectively in this media environment has several key elements:
This is the format that Out Now recommended Amro identify as likely to be most successful in meeting the challenges of this media environment.
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