Black Friday has become synonymous with consumerism and is characterized by doorbuster deals and intense advertising campaigns. Embraced as a major shopping day, brands vigorously compete for attention and share of voice on all platforms, and rightfully so: enthusiastic shoppers actively seek out the most enticing deals to make a purchase.

Etihad Airways, the UAE’s national airline, wanted to build on the momentum of its 2022 Black Friday Sale. For 2023, the task was to increase Pre-sale Subscriptions to 12K, Bookings by 15% and Digital Revenue by 15%.

For this global sale, Etihad Airways found itself facing an unconventional challenge: how do you turn shoppers into passengers in a period heavily dominated by retail?

Imagine a customer searching for a special Black Friday sale on an iPhone, which is what a very large number of people tend to do before Black Friday.

That customer’s search would be taken over by us, and we would infiltrate their search results by presenting to them a more attractive option: with our incredibly low fares, why not just fly to New York, and with the money you’ve saved, buy that iPhone you were looking for?

That was our big idea. Send people to places where they could buy the things they were searching for. Turning shoppers into passengers.

Google trends showed that high-value items like electronics & home appliances, dominated Black Friday search interest. Deal-seeking was active, with 70% of shopping-related searches containing “black friday” occurring in October and the days leading up to the main event. It became evident that people had wishlists and were waiting for the best deal to purchase them.

People also had a bucket list of destinations they wanted to visit, but despite airline tickets being a high value item, it had very low top-of-mind recall during this sale period.

Introducing Etihad’s Black Friday Sale campaign, one that capitalizes on current search trends, to turn competing brands into allies. In this campaign, we nudged shoppers when they were browsing with high purchase intent. We suggested they buy an Etihad ticket during Black Friday and fly to that destination to buy the product they were searching for, using the money saved on our fares.

Within our two-phased campaign architecture, we addressed Black Friday shoppers, pre-sale and during sale. For 3 weeks, we used a multi-layered campaign approach across 34 markets and 11 channels (like YouTube, Google Ads, Paid Search, Meta, TikTok and Snapchat) to create an impactful user journey. Especially across digital channels, we used the capability of InMarket Audiences in order to serve the right offer to the right consumer at the right time of their Black Friday journey. YouTube for Action tools drove consumers to Etihad’s landing page to view fares.

We also ran a Subscription campaign on Meta, in which interested users had the opportunity to subscribe and learn more about the deals being offered, get notified when the sale starts and reminded when it ends. This would not only increase engagement and conversion, but seamlessly bring in valuable data to our CRM database in a cookie-less world.

The campaign overperformed on every metric.

Campaign CTR soared at 219% above benchmark (Google).

24K new pre-sale subscriptions led to a 33% increase in the CRM database for future campaigns, and 1.8M website visits resulted in a 56% increase YOY in bookings.

Furthermore, Digital Revenue was up by 35% YOY and Digital Share of Revenue increased from 34% to 46% YOY.

We also achieved the highest-ever revenue coming from Paid Search in a single day, +60% YOY.

ROAS was +69% YOY but the biggest achievement was the highest revenue from a digital sale in the airline’s 20-year history, which surpassed the previous record by 48%

Even though this was a tactical campaign, it created a spill-over effect; Etihad Airways brand lift increased in key markets: Canada +53% | US +37% | UK +16% | Australia +41%