Contiki is celebrating its 55th year with a throwback to the travel company’s heritage, bringing back its first ever ad campaign from the 1970s on social media.
The campaign reintroduces four of Contiki's first ever TV ads, featuring a retro jingle synonymous with marketing of that era.
Bringing back the TV ads on social media is ironic for Contiki as the brand has moved away from traditional TV advertising and more into social content as its target audience shift to digital channels.
“The ad is something we are sharing with people across our social channels because it shows how far we’ve gone. We’ve moved from jingles and sales messaging to become a very different brand today,” Contiki managing director Katrina Barry tells AdNews.
“We abandoned traditional ads in the 80s or 90s. Then we abandoned traditional marketing from 2011 and since then we have focused on being a storyteller, collaborating with publishers [such as Pedestrian and Junkee] and influencers, encouraging our audience to tell their story, which allows us to integrate user-generated content.
“Today we are our own creative, media and production agency. We still work with the very best but we have our own internal capabilities.”
Contiki’s last major marketing push used influencers for a social content series. It was developed in-house, reaching more than two million people across social media.
“The last three years influencer marketing has become really important. We know content off platform is the best way to drive our audience,” Barry says.
While Contiki leverages youth-focused publishers, it also considers itself its own publisher.
“It’s a bold choice for a brand to make the move to become content creators. Content might be easier in the travel sector, but it’s trust and community that we build on our platform that translates to sales,” Barry says.
To launch Contiki’s latest offering – a nine-day-foodies-trip through Europe called 'Munch' – the business called on several influencers, including former MasterChef contestant Hayden Quinn and food bloggers Eating up with The Hannashians.
“With the influencers we used to launch Munch, we gave them full creative control, which has risks. But you only get to be 55 years old if you listen to your audience," Barry explains.
The push to launch a food tour, which offers cooking classes, market tours, interviews with local chefs and more, was driven by Contiki's own findings that younger travellers care more about food than site sightseeing.
“We were shocked to find that young travellers considered food to be more important that sites. In response we have been aggressively upgrading our food experiences,” Barry says.
Introducing food tours is just one way the brand is trying to stay relevant and change perceptions it only offers party tours.
“Our average traveller has shifted from 20 years old to 26 and we recognise there are different ways to travel,” Barry says.
“We change it up every 5-10 years. Contiki may have been a party bus in the 80-90s but today we are moving away from the party feel and we recognise that only 25% of our customers want that high energy trip.”
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