Our company developed a branded content solution with their creative agency to bring Cathay Pacific’s concept of travel itself and how to live well, one must also travel well to life. Aligning Cathay Pacific with a fascinating traveler, our company worked with Usman Haque - a well-travelled architect and designer whose work has been showcased across the globe. He was the ideal protagonist for compelling branded content storytelling as his work necessitates regular travel and he’s conscious of using his journey as inspiration. The concept of an experiential journey could be demonstrated organically and with authenticity through his story, connecting effortlessly with the principles of Cathay Pacific’s communications. The online story follows Haque’s journey from his London studio to Hong Kong, whilst outlining his philosophy about travel, inspiration and bringing people together.

The “Life Well Travelled” campaign was designed to live on many touchpoints across TV, digital and social audiences.

The branded content element, created by our company in collaboration with Cathay’s creative agency, was central to its execution, with content about Usman Haque playing out in an integrated, global, cross platform campaign. Usman’s story was turned into a 30” TV commercial for broadcast and three longer format videos on an advertising feature page, with strategic native placements on our business and travel web sections to drive traffic to the ad feature. The fast-turnaround of the project also enabled the branded content to feature in the TV billboards and digital banners that signposted Cathay Pacific’s sponsorship of the editorial content “The Trip That Changed My Life”. This ensured a high degree of integration and contextual advertising that aligned with the editorial content.

The ad feature hub that housed the “Life Well Travelled” branded content had over 250K Page Views, 196K Unique Visitors over 6 weeks [Source: Adobe Reports and Analytics].

There were high levels of engagement with the content, with the Average Time Spent on the page 220 seconds [Source: Adobe Reports and Analytics].

The editorial content, sponsored by Cathay Pacific with elements of the Usman Haque branded content used as contextual advertising, performed strongly. The digital editorial sponsorship generated 7.8m page views, 855k unique visitors, with an average 200 seconds spent per user.

A media wall collating the responses of a social campaign for the sponsored editorial content - #mygreatestadventure – generated 538k page views, 60k unique and over 150 active participants.

In a post campaign effectiveness survey, 95% of respondents that recalled the campaign claimed to have a better impression of Cathay Pacific after seeing it. Campaign recall was 55%.