Objective

The Travel Corporation, a global leader in guided tours, set out to drive more purchases across their portfolio of travel experiences. However, their Paid Media, Creative, and Marketing teams faced a significant hurdle: running effective video-based Catalog Ad campaigns required heavy manual work. This not only slowed down production but also led to creative fatigue, ultimately impacting campaign performance and their ability to meet critical KPIs.

Solution

To address these challenges, The Travel Corporation partnered with Smartly–the AI Advertising Platform–to automate and scale their creative production for Meta’s Catalog Product Video (CPV) solution. The collaboration began with a clear focus: reduce the manual workload, refresh creatives frequently to curb ad fatigue, and improve campaign performance through personalized and engaging video ads.

Smartly's SparkWorks creative team collaborated closely with the client to design custom Video Templates for Catalog Ads aligned with The Travel Corporation’s brand guidelines and campaign goals. These templates, combined with Smartly’s automation capabilities—Workspaces and Automation Feeds—enabled dynamic creative variant production at scale. This approach ensured a consistent brand look and feel across multiple markets while significantly speeding up the creative lifecycle.

Through Smartly’s AI-powered automated workflows, the need for manual intervention in production and optimization was minimized. Weekly syncs and constant communication ensured a smooth rollout, reducing the need for back-and-forth while fine-tuning the templates to meet specific creative feedback.

The results spoke for themselves. The catalog ads using video creative generated with Smartly Templates outperformed static ads by a wide margin. They drove a 4x higher CTR compared to static DPAs, and resulted in a 77% decrease in Cost per Click (CPC), while also providing efficient delivery, evidenced by a 12% lower CPM (Cost per Mille).

These improvements exceeded the client’s expectations by a factor of four, directly contributing to increased ticket sales—all without adding operational overhead.

This success has opened new doors for The Travel Corporation, allowing them to refresh creative effortlessly, maintain engagement, and avoid the pitfalls of creative fatigue. Inspired by the results, they are now planning to expand their use of Smartly’s Video Templates for Catalog Ads across additional channels.