Let’s Do London

The Covid-19 lockdowns greatly affected the UK hospitality industry as well as London’s economy which is heavily reliant on tourism and leisure. During the tentative reopening of the country, London & Partners, working with the wider tourism industry, identified an opportunity to accelerate London’s economic recovery by encouraging people across the UK to enjoy the unrivalled entertainment, food and drink, tourism and shopping experiences the capital has to offer.​

With foreign travel restrictions still in place, and domestic tourism on the rise, our challenge was to build an inspirational campaign targeting UK-based holidaymakers who usually defaulted to trips abroad to plan a holiday in London instead, whilst also fighting off competition from popular regional destinations like Cornwall and Scotland. As there wasn’t the budget to blanket target the country, we had to identify the regional audiences most likely to visit and weight our communications accordingly with the ultimate goal being to increase volume of visits and spend.

Studying spend and travel patterns on YouGov, we identified two key audiences:. The first segment consisted of the Day trippers who offered a high volume of visits with a low spend. Skewing closer to London, they were more likely to take spontaneous trips, so our campaign needed to focus on nudging them to visit immediately.

In contrast, the short breakers from further afield offered a lower volume of trips but a much higher spend. As these audiences were more likely to plan their visit in advance, our campaign needed to balance priming stage communications that would inspire them with timely nudges to prompt action​.

We then embarked on a detailed study of different UK regions to understand where we should concentrate our efforts. Data points included: Audience size and past / intended travel behaviour (YouGov)​ ; Travel time to London (Network Rail)​; Regional audience prosperity index (Experian / Acorn)​;Average value of a London day trip by region (London & Partners)​ .We identified three tiers to prioritise across our targeting strategy using a weighted scorecard. We then proportionally weighted media spend against the top two tiers to ensure maximum return on advertising investment.​

Tier 1, close to and including London, received heavy active-stage media support, on the understanding that latent knowledge of what London had to offer would already exist and trip booking would be more spontaneous.

Tier 2, focusing on the Midlands, North-West and East, received a layered priming and active campaign, acknowledging the longer journey from inspiration to conversion. In June, before lockdown ended, we landed a priming message via radio, paid OOH and social to ensure we had built critical mass by the time restrictions were lifted. These channels were selected to balance inspirational assets with the need to be live quickly and at scale.​

Tier 3 was omitted from activity due to the low economic return it presented.​ On July 19th we launched our hero TV spot with a heavyweight broadcast campaign (executed by an agile AV team who had deferred the full value from the original June 21st date without a drop in quality). This was supported in Tiers 1 and 2 with digital amplification to reflect the changes to media consumption brought around by the pandemic, reaching travel intenders across multiple devices. Through our relationship with TfL, we also secured £3.5m of OOH value-in-kind in Greater London, focused on increasing spend and attraction visitation once people reached the capital. ​