In this panel, together with Lottie and Prisca, we looked into Contiki's TikTok Challenge which was launched in partnership with NYC Tourist Board.
Lottie started the session by providing an overview of Contiki, the world's leading group travel company for 18-35 year olds. She explained they are a social-first brand, having community in their DNA, which places it at the heart of their social strategy. They create unique experiences to provide travellers with lifelong memories, the reason why their strategy across social channels is to build relationships, drive trust and turn followers into collaborators.
Lottie started the session by providing an overview of Contiki, the world's leading group travel company for 18-35 year olds. She explained they are a social-first brand, having community in their DNA, which places it at the heart of their social strategy. They create unique experiences to provide travellers with lifelong memories, the reason why their strategy across social channels is to build relationships, drive trust and turn followers into collaborators.
In this panel, together with Lottie Norman, from Contiki, and Prisca Sanchez, from NYC & Company, we looked into Contiki's TikTok Challenge which was launched in partnership with NYC Tourist Board.
Lottie started the session by providing an overview of Contiki, the world's leading group travel company for 18-35 year olds. She explained they are a social-first brand, having community in their DNA, which places it at the heart of their social strategy. They create unique experiences to provide travellers with lifelong memories, the reason why their strategy across social channels is to build relationships, drive trust and turn followers into collaborators.
Lottie explained to us that the project was launched in August 2019 with the hunt for a TikTok creator campaign, for which they used the tag #contikifindyourpeople that has 1.8 million views. This platform allowed the company to bring its brand personality to life and it facilitates meaningful connections to travel.
Contiki found that TikTok is the entertainment platform where travel lovers go to find fun, creative and interesting content, with fun being the foremost content.
Lottie also mentioned that they are focused on building a community of creators through the platform with the aim of speaking to people. She highlighted that most creators on TikTok use the platform as a memory keepsake box, especially when it comes to travel, which is where Contiki saw great potential for this initiative.
She explained that TikTok has given rise to a new generation of local tour guides who are passionate to show others the hidden hems in their cities and the local culture.
The campaign they have developed was a result of looking at the creator economy and taking an entertainment first approach. Under the name of 'Contiki Convince Me', the campaign is a challenge-based, creator content series that is centred in TikTok and reaches a range of channels. It was designed for destination discovery and to stretch across the topics that matter to their audience: sustainability, unique experience, adventure, food, music, etc.
Lottie explained that the content centres around ‘convince me challenges' for creators to engage their communities, reach new audiences and educate them along the way.
Prisca started her intervention by giving an overview of NYC & Company, the official destination marketing organisation for New York City, and gave an overview of how they ended up partnering up with Contiki to invite travellers back into the city.
She explained that in March 2021, 77% of American travellers reported they were looking at taking leisure trips in the following three months. This allowed them to identify that the summer was the right timing to activate. When looking at their audiences, they took a phased-out approach, and they found out the following:
As Prisca said, this resulted in NYC & Company identifying their key demographics for the campaign, realising they had to focus on locals first, and then expand their footprint to the entire Northeast area and the rest of the world.
Their opportunity relied on developing a campaign platform that created urgency and gave visitors permission to visit now while encouraging locals to go out and rediscover their city. In addition, the campaign had to portray New York City as an open and friendly destination that was ready to welcome visitors back.
Prisca explained that their strategy was to create awareness and tap into people's FOMO, through ongoing, real-time content across owned and paid channels. To achieve this, they also made use of NYC's most recognisable image, the Statue of Liberty.
From a promotional standpoint, Prisca highlighted that they wanted to have a heavy digital presence, which is why they adopted a video everywhere approach: national cable TV, internet-connected TV and online video including YouTube. They also relied on paid search and display, social media, influencer marketing, direct partnerships and OOH Media.
Prisca explained that they knew they needed locals to be their ambassadors by means of telling the most authentic stories about the city. By means of reaching the right audiences to restart tourism after the pandemic, Contiki and NYC & Company co-developed an integrated partnership model, with a creative and business-centric approach that was data-driven and results-oriented.
The idea was to develop a creator-led campaign, driven by culture, which was deeply embedded in the Contiki experience with a challenge-led format to fill the funnel, drive engagement and make NYC famous on TikTok.
Lottie explained they came up with a challenge which they then asked their creator to reply to, which resulted in their audiences replying to it and further distributing it.
She provided the following overview of the creators content flow:
As Lottie mentioned, they challenged TikTok creators to explore the unexplored and bring NYC to life for their audiences. In a nutshell, they were looking for culturally-driven creators across themes such as food, lifestyle and fashion, comedy and dating life. They developed different challenges to appeal to the different types of audiences each creator had to attract tourism to different activities within the city.
To achieve engagement, Contiki created a competition to get audiences to participate. They asked people to convince them about why they deserved a free Contiki trip to NYC, which aimed at creating some conversions through the campaign.
The campaign had more than a million online reaches, with TikTok videos having +400.000 views, and their competition having 25.000 entries, which resulted in their sales going up by 12% month on month for Contiki trips to NYC.
1. Social media has become a powerful tool to achieve objectives and grow our audiences.
2. Partnering with relevant organisations can increase our results by doubling our audiences.
3. Collaborating with influencers allows tapping into the audience's minds in a powerful way.
Before joining Contiki Marketing as Content Marketing Director, Lottie worked both in-house for VisitBritain and agency side for the Publicis network within both Europe and APAC regions.
Proudly born and raised Mexican, Prisca (Prees- cah) Sanchez is currently the VP of Marketing at NYC & Company, where she is responsible for overseeing all international consumer and travel trade marketing efforts to position New York City as a top destination globally.
Created for destinations around the world, this programme will provide the insight to help you become a sustainability leader within your organisation.
Designed to teach you how to master must-have tools and acquire essential skills to succeed in managing your destination or organisation, be ready to challenge all of your assumptions.
Designed to teach you how to master must-have tools and acquire essential skills to succeed in managing your destination or organisation, be ready to challenge all of your assumptions.
.webp)