Black Friday at Merlin Entertainments
Last years creative
After seeing the creative from last years black Friday, I knew we could do better. It felt very dated & I didn’t understand the colour coloration nor the message. Where’s the brand? What am I saving £60 on? Where’s the 3 months free shout? So I worked with one of my direct reports on designing the new assets for the 2019 sale.
The most important thing to me was to make sure the message was clear and concise whilst still aligning with Black Friday creative themes & colours. (black & sale yellow) The Merlin annual pass isn’t something everybody knows about. In order to reach this bigger audience, I needed my creatives to explain it quickly & be captivating. Really playing on the nature of theme parks, “thrilling”
“Rodelle was a complete breath of fresh air at Merlin Entertainments. From the moment she set foot in the door she hit the ground running. She got to grips with the diverse product portfolio in record time and built solid working relationships with all of our internal stakeholders.
She turned around a complex CRM upgrades Membership campaign and launched the Black Friday sale in under 6 weeks. I’d 100% work with Rodelle again”
The most important thing to me was to make sure the message was clear and concise whilst still aligning with Black Friday creative themes & colours. (black & sale yellow) The Merlin annual pass isn’t something everybody knows about. In order to reach this bigger audience, I needed my creatives to explain it quickly & be captivating. Really playing on the nature of theme parks, “thrilling”
Campaign produced a 38% YoY increase in sales, generating £2.6m in revenue
The paid media used was search, display and social. Based on historical data, the budget was split 60% search & display and 40% social.
Setting up in Google; Conversion based goal. I was aware of the fact consumers would wait in till the last days of the sale to purchase, to get the most out of “theme park season”. Because of this I decided to leave google to auto maximise bids & allow some target expansion. As I knew the trajectory would be steady for the most part of the sale till the last week. (42% of the targeted revenue came in the last two days!)
Still optimising the best performing ads.
Audiences are set to observation, based on a more consideration/intent type. Such as tourists, sightseers, family attractions, thrill seekers, parents off (excluding infants), & children activities due to the commitment of the product.
Keywords were autogenerated, but I manually added/removed any that cannibalised the Merlin's attractions and tried not to have too many name brand terms.
Facebook & Instagram were also targeted to conversions. The event being add to cart, with auto placement. Bid strategy set to lowest cost due to having less budget on these channels. Creating a look a like audience to what had been successful for last year’s campaign.
For all channel’s gif/video content was used over static where possible.
