Project: Florida Baby
Client: Travel City Direct
Date: 2010/11
Task: To position Travel City Direct as the friendly, Florida family specialists. To engage with parents of young children travelling to Orlando. To build online buzz for the TCD brand. To encourage user generated content and online interaction with the brand. To gain media coverage for TCD, beyond the price message.
Insight: Our social media monitoring for TCD idnetified a need for an online resource for parents of babies and small children to find out more about the logistics of taking youngsters to Orlando.
Implementation: We designed, wrote and built a website called www.floridababy.co.uk, packed with information aimed specifically at parents of pre-schoolers. We populated the site with a series of entertaining videos we made on location in the UK, at Orlando Airport and in Walt Disney World Resort, Florida. We built a customer forum for visitors to discuss their own experiences, and we hosted all the videos on YouTube to allow viewers to respond to the videos with their own, and to share the videos with friends. We launched the website to the media with a screening at a central London location. We seeded the website and videos throughout YouTube and other video sharing sites, within online parenting and travel forums, and in blogs and on social networks. In November 2010, we sent a Sun reporter to Orlando with her baby to ‘test drive’ the site. Happily, she found it invaluable. This year, we worked with reporters from The People and The Press Association who took their young families to Orlando to write about their experiences.
Results: Seven months since launch, we have had over 6000 visitors to the website, 60 members signed up to the forum, and over 55,000 people have viewed the videos – pretty good for a niche product! Media coverage for Florida Baby has appeared in The Sun, Scottish Sun, Sunday Mirror, News of the World, on aol.com, yahoo, and been discussed on tripadvisor, netmums and on Twitter. The offline press to date is valued at over £300,000 and the video downloads at over £60,000.
Florida Baby won Best Strategic PR Campaign in the Overseas category at the 2011 Travel Marketing Awards, held at the Intercontinental Hotel, Park Lane on 24 March 2011.