Cruise Line Changes Course

Cruise lines have a habit of enticing customers with images of white sand beaches and palm trees. Celebrity Cruises did the same thing until it realized that its ads failed to distinguish it and may actually have helped sell cabins for other lines.

But Celebrity is changing that with a multimedia campaign consisting of DRTV spots and a $1 million online drive.

Gone from the ads are the typical images of cruise ships motoring along on vast blue oceans. They have been replaced by a regular guy wearing a white Celebrity T-shirt who talks up the cruise line's service and the fun of cruising.

The spots began last fall and will end in April, during the company's first quarter. Roughly 60% of all bookings come in during this period.

The online portion of the campaign began last month — “crunch time for the cruise industry,” said Gaston Legorburu, co-founder and managing director of Planning Group International (PGI) in Miami, which handles online marketing for Celebrity.

About 2.5 million e-mails were sent to prospects describing a sweepstakes called “Carats and Cruise.” The promotion, which plays off the theme of the TV campaign, entices travelers with $100,000 in prizes, including the white T-shirt adorned with $50,000 worth of diamonds arranged to spell out Celebrity on the front of the shirt. Other prizes include a customized cruise for two and a variety of other trips.

The ads target 35- to 62-year-olds with incomes of $75,000 or higher.

Banner ads ran simultaneously with the e-mail blasts at entertainment, travel-related and lifestyle sites.

Both the banners and the e-mails had six variations on the sweeps promotion. Using rapid-cycle testing and real-time optimization, the responses were monitored by PGI and creative was adjusted, daily if necessary. “Within a couple of hours we can understand not just the response, but what the quality of leads were, and we can tweak creative, message and media placement in real time,” Legorburu said. “We optimize this campaign every day.”

A click on one banner that appears at www.celebritycruises.com offers visitors a link to a registration form that asks for name, address and birth date (entrants must be 18 or older). Once the form is completed and submitted, a sell page pops up, congratulating the entrant and promoting a handful of cruises. A “Tell-a-Friend” link at the bottom of the page earns visitors up to five additional entries to the sweepstakes.

Meanwhile, a paper direct mailing was being prepared early this month. Creative was tweaked based on results from the banners and e-mails. “The online learnings do successfully translate to other media,” Legorburu said. “It's incredibly predictable.”