lastminute.com

The Objective

Lastminute.com, one of the UK’s largest and longest-serving online travel retailers, were recently looking to help young audiences across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland beat the January blues with a new range of flight and hotel packages.

To reach their target audience of Gen Z and Millennial holidaymakers and spread the message of "Holiopathy" — their new pseudo-supplement which represents their range of blues-busting packages — Lastminute.com looked to TikTok to help secure engagement with the young people of the UK.

The Solution

Lastminute.com decided to deploy a combination of both TopView and In-Feed Ads to ensure maximum reach for its campaign. The TopView ad placement is 100% sound-on and occupies the full screen of all UK users upon launching the app. The native feel of the ad placement perfectly complemented the campaign’s quirky creative, and helped to generate some astonishing click-through figures for the short duration it ran.

For its In-Feed Ad, the same catchy creative video was served up alongside other content from across the TikTok community on users' For You feeds.

The video itself consisted of a 10-second clip satirising a health supplement commercial, complete with a mock Holiopathy pill bottle, and called on users to find their perfect holiday to cure the lethargy associated with the first months of the year. An amusing voiceover added to the impact of the video, and likely helped boost engagement thanks to TikTok’s 100% sound-on user experience.

Coupled with a call to action directing users to a landing page displaying Lastminute.com’s humorous package offerings (Including a "Vitamin D Booster" for those looking for winter sun and a "Routine Remover" to escape the daily grind), both ads provided a clear journey for users to follow as they searched for their perfect blues-beating holiday, as well as securing excellent brand exposure with their target audience.

The Results

Launching across the UK on February 2, 2020 and running for just 24 hours, the TopView yielded some remarkable results for the short duration it was live.

More than 10.5 million impressions were recorded during the campaign, with an engagement rate of 18%. Such positive figures clearly show how impactful a targeted message can be when deployed through a TopView, and that members of the UK Gen Z and millennial audience were genuinely interested in the highly creative content — a point confirmed by the 51,000+ likes recorded.

The second part of the campaign, the In-Feed Ad, ran for seven days from February 3-9. Achieving its benchmark for click-throughs and successfully guiding thousands of young people to Lastminute.com’s campaign landing page, it served as a strong accompaniment to the TopView, and further strengthened the campaign’s message with its more natural and widespread placement in users’ feeds.

The average watch time per video surpassed the benchmark set for the campaign, and in terms of total views, the TopView reached nearly 10.4 million in just 24 hours, with more than 20% of viewers watching at least half of the entire 10-second video.

Lastminute.com’s exciting and unique campaign found the perfect home on TikTok, proving the platform’s reputation as the definitive destination for the world’s best short-form creative content. Securing unrivalled levels of targeted Gen Z and Millennial exposure for both their products and brand, this TopView + In-Feed Ads campaign outperformed all expectations, and confirmed TikTok’s ability to guarantee real engagement with young people around the world.