TUI Finds Best Performing Creative Elements by Playing with Modular Approach

How to Attract New Customers with Video Content

TUI Belgium and TUI Netherlands, both leading travel organizations in their respective markets, wanted to reach new qualified users through Facebook and Instagram. As their existing video content wasn’t initially created for social media, they needed a new way to produce video content and test what would drive the results they were looking for.

Personalized Video Ads at Scale

TUI has a vast audience with diverse travel preferences. In order to be relevant, they needed to create personalized content for each sub-audience. They started with dividing the content into three categories: active people in beautiful destinations, various traveler personas, and different benefits and call-to-actions. TUI also had two hypotheses they wanted to validate:

• Shorter video content works better in social media than long (6” vs. 10”).

• People planning a holiday relate more with content that showcases different traveler personas rather than footage with active people in beautiful destinations.

To avoid creating all possible video combinations manually, TUI tapped into Smartly.io’s creative solutions:

1. First, Smartly.io’s Creative Studio created video templates for each variation: 1) a 10-second video with a landscape intro, 2) a 6-second video with a landscape intro, 3) a 6-second video with a persona intro.
   

2. After creating the templates, Smartly.io automatically matched them with TUI’s original video assets. Smartly.io’s solution generated all possible combinations, resulting in more than 100 versions of the video ad.
   

3. Lastly, TUI A/B tested all the hypotheses. They applied all the learnings to ensure they were running the most successful video concept for the rest of the campaign.

Myth Busted: Longer Video Ads Outperformed Short, Persona-Specific Videos 

The results showed that along the funnel, the 10-second video outperformed the 6-second ones with impressive results:

• 72% lower cost per initiate checkout

• 36% lower cost per purchase

As for content, TUI concluded that their audience is more inspired by footage of different activities and experiences rather than footage of people. These learnings and the new approach to modular video will be incorporated in TUI’s future campaigns and creative testing.

“Smartly.io's Creative Studio has changed the way we approach creative testing and planning. With their help, we’ve been able to scale our creatives to 100s from a limited amount of assets, all in an automated fashion. The outcome couldn’t be better: we are able to learn what are the most engaging elements from our assets with huge performance improvements.”

Nicolas Elshout, Lead Programmatic Media Buying, TUI Benelux