Etihad Airways is an international airline headquartered in Abu Dhabi, serving more than 400 destinations worldwide. The airline industry is characterized by?multiple?granular?target group?segments?and enormous price pressure in an extremely dynamic environment, where real-time price comparison is an integral part of?every customer journey.?

Flexible response options in adjusting prices and routes, which must also be reflected in online advertising media, are therefore crucial. The intense competition for airline brands to attract travelers is reflected in their competition for the latest advertising technologies and?sophisticated?targeting approaches?to gain competitive advantages.?

In January Etihad Airways offered?discounted fares on selected routes for a short period of time?within?their biggest annual global sales campaign. The setup required?maximum flexibility in adapting creatives considering a variety of factors?and data?including individual travel motivation to serve each user with a precisely tailored ad.?

By matching the creative variants with the hyper-personalized audience segmentation, the ADE allows for fully dynamic campaigns.?

The ADE combines dynamic creatives with dynamic audience profiles that can be adapted with the click of a button and will then – automatically – trigger the right dynamic creative permutation.?We?concatenate audience signals for the 2,304 audience segments and?link them to corresponding creative modular data inputs to create a dynamic set of 45,915?tailored ads.?We therefore refer to the ADE as meta-dynamic. Every change in the customer's input results in a dynamic adaptation of the target group definition. By combining these dynamic audiences with dynamic?creatives, the entire campaign setup from creation to delivery becomes dynamic.?To be able to drive the global sales campaign?only one creative shell which displays all creative data in the right position?is needed per format.

The ADE, built?from scratch?for Etihad’s January Sales campaign,?processes?all?data points?needed for?audience?definition?and creative?generation?down to the last detail.?

All?more persistent data?points are stored in libraries. This includes airport codes,?languages,?reading direction,?fixed translations,?currencies,?country-specific price spellings,?different logos,?legal information texts?and an extensive database of?up to 95,000?route-specific?landing pages for each of the?16 potential?languages.??

This data infrastructure is enriched with ad-hoc campaign data 72 hours before launch.?While the?client?provides all?advertised routes,?cabin classes and?prices, the creative agency?uploads?all copy and image assets.?From the media agency side,?a?geographical?model to?define?to the nearest departure airport, user language?information, as well as?travel intent?and in-market audience data?as well as DMP signals are provided to make each?ad a personalized experience.

Our?approach?makes it possible to utilize and prepare data from a wide variety of independent sources in such a?unique?way that manual intervention is minimized and an enormous time- and cost-related advantage is created.?As?only one template needs to be created for each?ad?format,?production costs?have?been?reduced?by?85% compared to the previous year's campaign, while maintaining the lead time of 72 hours.?At the same time, we?significantly?increased?the?number?of individual ads by 2,770%?and furthermore enhanced the user experience?by serving each user a tailor-made ad permutation.?

Our solution also improved?collaboration?across time zones?with all information transparently shared in an instant. We reduced?the absolute number of hours required for the campaign by 75% compared to the previous year.?The tailored ads outperformed previous creatives resulting in a significant increase in Sales and ROAS.