One Trip. Two Destinations. (eng)

In the US market, VisitDenmark has primarily partnered with airlines that has direct flights to Denmark. Thus, our marketing efforts have also been primarily concentrated around the east and west coasts of the United States. The Co-branding collaboration with Icelandair gave us the opportunity to market a completely different product to a target group that we have not worked with before.

Icelandair has stop-over connections from 19 gateways in North America to 23 gateways in Europe, of which Copenhagen is the third most popular destination. The collaboration with Icelandair thus represented a great strategic potential.

You probably could not choose two destinations more different than Iceland and Copenhagen. Iceland with its unique and spectacular nature, and Copenhagen with its fantastic gastronomy, architecture and urban culture. So how could we unite these two stories into one?

The solution was to turn that exact difference into an advantage. Since Icelandair offers a stop-over service at no extra charge, we could base our marketing message on the narrative that you can experience two very different destinations in one trip. Our brand statement, “One trip. Two destinations “, thus helped to substantiate the story of how Americans with their already very limited vacation could get the most out of this one trip.

The link between the two very different destinations, which helped to ensure that the campaign film was not perceived as an advertisement for two separate and irrelevant products, was to use so-called visual match-cuts. From the vertical lines in Grundtvig Church to the rock formations on Black Sand Beach. From the galloping Icelandic horses to a female cyclist in Copenhagen. From the colorful houses in Christianshavn to the green lunar landscapes on Iceland. This way, one overall and visually very captivating narrative was created that managed to stand out from the crowd in a large and crowded American advertising market.

The purpose of the campaign was primarily to create brand awareness, as well as to increase the brand interest, brand preference and ultimately to support the booking conversions for Icelandair. It was also important for us that it could be clearly documented that the brand effect was directly derived from our campaign.

We marketed the film as YouTube in-stream pre-rolls and added Google’s Brand Lift Study 2.0 to gain valuable performance insights such as ad recall, brand consideration and brand interest lift. In addition, we ran a TrueView for Action retargeting track to leverage the brand interest and preference that the campaign had created to support the booking conversions for Icelandair.

Campaign period: April 1 - May 15 2019

Target group: Travellers from Seattle, Washington, Minneapolis and Minnesota

Market: US

Partner: Icelandair