Ritter Sport has collaborated with digital marketing specialist Echolution to create a travel content advertising campaign which promoted the family-owned chocolate brand’s Vegan Travel Edition Tower. As reported, Ritter Sport unveiled its Vegan Tower in January, offering a selection of vegan chocolates in a 5x100g pack.
The campaign, which ran through April, saw Echolution create tailored creatives for Ritter Sport and position them in consumer-facing digital travel media publications such as Condé Nast Traveller, Tripadvisor, Time Out, Thrillist and The Times travel section.
“Our brief from Ritter Sport was to create awareness among future travellers of the Vegan Travel Edition tower,” said Echolution Partner Eamonn Leacy. “The whole concept was to target travellers leading up to and at the point of travelling out of three major UK airports (London Heathrow, London Gatwick and Manchester).
“We achieved this by contextually targeting and placing the brand advertising campaign within relevant online destination travel content that travellers would be researching and viewing while travelling to or from these airports.
“The numbers speak for themselves; we achieved 2400+ unique creative variations which were targeted against hyper-relevant travel content. We generated advertisements for 115 tourist destinations and achieved high engagement rates of 0.68% click through rate (CTR) per advertisement, and 82% viewable impressions overall.”
The brand reported top ten tourist destinations in terms of traveller engagement – Ibiza (1.65% CTR), Paris (1.46% CTR), Hong Kong (1.45% CTR), while Madrid, Istanbul, Thailand, Barcelona, New York, Zurich and Antalya also performed well with CTRs between 1.24% and 1.05.
Ritter Sport had been keen to invest in a highly targeted, well-researched digital campaign to create brand awareness directly among travellers. By using mobile data and targeting the main traffic routes into departure airports, Echolution was able to ensure that the travellers saw the brand campaign before starting their journey. 
Leacy added: “The campaign performed well over a three-week duration. In addition to serving destination-centric advertising to consumers while they researched ‘what to do on holiday’ or ‘beach activities in Ibiza’, at the same time as they were booking flights – we also served them reminders closer to their flight time with geo-targeting across train stations as well as the airports of focus.”
Ritter Sport Global Travel Retail Managing Director Jan Pasold said, “We are happy with the results of this highly targeted and travel-centric ad campaign. With this level of engagement, we know brand awareness among travellers will have increased. The next stage is joining the dots with our travel retail partners in key locations in order to make the most of the geo-location capabilities.” ✈
