Diwali season is the Black Friday for brands in India. Over the last decade, e-commerce giants with their big budgets take over print during this time to promote their annual sales. So much so that India’s #1 newspaper frequently splits their daily in two to have two separate front pages full of ads. In fact, most newspapers during sale season will feature 10+ pages of catalogue-style full-page discount advertising, not news. And why wouldn’t they? Indians spend over 2.5 trillion rupees shopping during this one week.

We’re Cleartrip, a not-so-big travel booking app, that obviously can’t compete with these budgets. But what we can do is hijack this boring media pattern (now a blind spot for consumers) and turn it into an advantage. Our task this sale season was to get Indians to realise that a good 'Diwali deal' can also be found in travel, instead of just things.

Normally, a single advert on page-11 of the Times of India after 6 consecutive pages of e-commerce & retail giants shouting their offers on the biggest sale day of the year would be considered wasted money. Winning amidst Diwali clutter however, needed a guerrilla approach.

Our page-11 ad called readers to use our web-app to scan every other offer they saw on that day’s front pages from other companies and turn them into similarly priced travel offers on Cleartrip. For eg: a Rs. 5,000/- discount on a toaster on page-1 from Amazon turned into a Rs. 5,000/- discount on flights. Price tags, discounts and any ‘thing’ with a value attached to it could be scanned & hijacked to reveal an equitable travel offer.

Through a cheeky mix of QR codes, AI & ML, we hijacked ever sale ad from the papers that day & turned them into Cleartrip ads.

Our strategy was to first create a notion of comparable pricing between purchasing travel v/s things. For this we chose print. Why? Because a decade worth of seasonal e-commerce/retail sale advertising on print have ensured India’s habit of ‘saving big expenses for Diwali discounts’.

While brands across categories fight for a share of the customer’s wallet, we realised that especially during Diwali, our competition wasn’t just other travel apps - it was every retailer offering discounts on high value items. The consumer’s wallet doesn’t get bigger suddenly during Diwali. What they’re hunting for during sale season (and therefore the catalogue-style advertising) are simply the best deals to spend on, regardless of category.

The predictability of sale season advertising ensured that we could easily hijack them to make consumers rethink their spending –“If you buy a new TV, you will miss going to Bali.” And this needed a guerrilla approach.

This hijack was powered by a QR code and our web-app, ortraveloncleartrip.com. We partnered with airlines & hotels to offer deals on flights & rooms, matching each price on our backend depending on the product/thing being scanned.

A challenge was not knowing what particular brands, products and price points would be advertised in that day’s newspaper. So, instead of training machine-learning for products, we did it for price points and discount percentages. The algorithm powering this was designed by merging AI with an ML process – into which we fed in 5-years’ worth of past festive season advertising.

Our mobile-first experience used OCR (optical character recognition) to identify the variables in print which were fed into the algorithm to intelligently reveal a similarly priced travel offer as soon as a number or percentage was scanned. Each offer button was then deep-linked to the app to complete the booking.

Brand Impact:

Brand consideration went up by 52%

Brand preference went up by 42%

469% uptick in number of mentions

2038% uptick in the number of conversations

#5 app on the app playstore ahead of all other travel apps

Organic App installs went up 2.6X

App featured in top 10 for the first time in Android & iOS

Trending at #5 on Twitter on the day of release

15 Mn Reach

10Mn + reach using earned PR

52% Increase in brand queries - Overtook competitor and #1 player MakeMyTrip for the first time

Business Impact:

Baseline shifted by 27% vs Pre-sale period

Total Airline sales Growth up by 27%

Domestic Flights up 24%

International Flights growth at 46%

25K Direct Scans worth 15Mn INR