We played on the natural nostalgic homesickness of our audience. Yes, they’ve moved away, but there’s absolutely ‘No Place Like Home’. So, rather than use clichéd, familiar images of Britain to lure people back for a visit, we chose to target expat Brits using a more irreverent tone of voice with images of the quirky, weird, wonderful and real Britain they know and love. The end result was both tongue-in-cheek and affectionate.

We created a campaign that made British living abroad nostalgic for Britain by appealing to their unique British sense of humour. For all its quirks and idiosyncrasies, Britain is home.

Based on what we knew about our expats’ location, over the year we sent them digital postcards of their hometowns. We also made films around the peak booking times of summer and Christmas that were a tongue-in-cheek look at Britain, that initially presented themselves as typical tourism pieces but soon revealed that they were less clichéd and a more realistic look at Britain that the British would recognise and empathise with. At Christmas, to encourage them to come home we let friends and relatives in the UK send personalised digital postcards made from a bespoke library of shots from every single county in the UK. All assets directed them to our booking page.

In less than 2 weeks, the British Summer video drove 4172 shares, 1082 comments and an engagement rate of up to 42% reaffirming that we had struck at the heart of what Brits miss about home.

One social post focused on driving engagement generated nearly 3,800 comments to date (19X the average number of comments similar British Airways posts normally receive).

85%-95% of engagement came directly from our core expat audience. The channel drove two thirds of traffic to the custom British airways splash page and resulted in more conversions than email, a traditionally high performing channel for British Airways.

And most importantly, Visit Britain reported a 7% increase in flights back to the UK during the period of our campaign compared to previous years.