Cottages.com needed to look and acts differently to the ‘sea of sameness’

Cottages.com understand that there is more to a perfect cottage holiday than the bricks & mortar of the building. They have started a process of content-gathering – reviews, partners, editors – to ensure that holiday makers can get the most inspiration and best information to help them find their perfect break - so we needed to build brand awareness, trust and consideration amongst existing cottage holiday takers.

We didn’t need to sell the idea of a cottage holiday, nor drive immediate ‘Book Now’ visits. We just needed a disruptive, overarching idea that could run across Google pre-roll & more traditional advertising.

Everybody’s idea of the perfect cottage holiday is different – but all cottage holidaymakers agree on one thing – that it’s about ‘being yourself’- so we needed to show locations and give an idea as to service.

We ran two YouTube pre-rolls whilst running a TVC on television.

The activity was very limited in budget and ran for two weeks in January 2016, a key time for the market.

Views equated to a ROI of £0.04 per view.

Brand Awareness was the target: "Absolute best in class results" that enabled us to establish the brand among both travellers and Cottage owners.

We saw a 93.7% lift in Brand Awareness (Within the YouTube and Google audience).

And 93.7% was the outcome against Google’s defined ‘Best In Class’ which is 32%.

Those that did skip the advertisements had 4x the Brand Recall than average YouTube pre-rolls.

So far TrueView ads have given us a 172.3% lift in Ad Recall and turned a new brand into a market leader in category.