London – 25 September 2012 – TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel website*, is thrilled to announce the winners of its 2012 creative advertising challenge, which offered the travel industry the unique opportunity to showcase their creativity and compete for the chance to win from a total prize fund of $1.5m in advertising value on TripAdvisor.
Thomson Holidays has been crowned the winner of the UK competition and receives $300k in CPM advertising media value on TripAdvisor, to execute their campaign later this year. Their submission, created by Beattie McGuinness Bungay, beat some very strong competition and just pipped Sandals and Tourism Australia to the top spot.
The Thomson Holidays entry involves the development of a Thomson Radio which will create music radio stations specific to the location the user is researching on TripAdvisor. The radio stations will be generated from Thomson’s Facebook fan page and also from TripAdvisor users submitting tracks themselves.
Martin Verdon-Roe, VP Display Sales, TripAdvisor said “The judges for the UK competition really liked this novel creative approach, and it delivers added value to the user experience when planning their travel on TripAdvisor, while the heart of the creative is driven by user feedback and recommendations.”
Nathan Timmins, Head of Online Marketing, Thomson said “We are thrilled to win this competition with such a creative idea from BMB. Every great holiday has a great soundtrack and Thomson is delighted to be able to provide an innovative way bringing holiday and music together.”
Due to the high quality of UK entries this year, TripAdvisor has extended the prize fund to include a highly commended award for the Sandals entry, created by the7stars UK. Their “Discover the world of Sandals” campaign wins them a further $100k USD in equivalent Display media value. The creative concept revolves around a virtual treasure hunt to win an all-inclusive holiday for two people at one of Sandals 13 exclusive resorts.
“We’re delighted to have been highly commended and have this opportunity to increase our brand presence on TripAdvisor, which is a brilliant platform for us. We couldn’t be more thrilled.” commented Jenny Anderson, Online Marketing Manager for Sandals.
TripAdvisor’s Martin Verdon-Roe, continued, “We were extremely impressed with both the quantity and quality of entries from all over the EMEA and APAC region, it was great to see brands extending their focus beyond sales-led creative and instead thinking about how they can use TripAdvisor and online display formats to engage and build their brand profiles to achieve long term strategic goals.”
Winning campaigns will run on TripAdvisor between October and December 2012. The campaigns were judged by a panel of CIMTIG representatives, as well as TripAdvisor sales and marketing experts.
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