KLM Gains Altitude With Video Ads

Major Airline Seeks Major ROI from Automated Video Ads

The customer journey in the travel industry has a lengthy awareness and consideration phase. KLM prioritizes cost-efficient acquisition channels such as video, but scaling video advertising on social media has been a challenge.

KLM A/B tested ad sets and quickly saw that video ads drove ROI. They also realized that personalization and automation are key components to scaling video advertising in a way that resonates with KLM’s audiences. However, manually creating hundreds of personalized video ads for different audiences simply wasn’t feasible. KLM needed a solution that could turn their still assets into video ads in an automated manner.

Boosting Efficiency with Video Templates

Smartly.io’s Video Templates allowed KLM and their agency partner Storm Digital to take a proven concept and scale it across four test markets. Video Templates pulled creative components from a feed that consisted of destination information and images.

The campaign advertised the ten most booked destinations in each market. These compact social videos were lightly animated to give a sneak peek of each city. The videos were adapted for upper-funnel prospecting; KLM aims to scale this tactic to other parts of the funnel as time goes on.

Soaring to New Heights of Success

Adding video to the creative mix resulted in a clear lift in CTR’s and upper funnel metrics.

The value of adding video to our creative mix was already clear to us, but we were not able to personalize and scale videos for our performance-driven campaigns. Smartly.io’s Video Templates make it possible to easily create inspiring dynamic videos for each KLM destination we fly from. -

Martine van der Lee, Director of Social Media, KLM