We’ve an early winner for best print ad campaign of 2013: Expedia UK

Print travel advertising has typically been very visual, and cliche driven — how many photos of beaches and happy tourists can you see? So a clever campaign that stop you in your browsing tracks, to read, ponder, and actually look forward to the next one in the series is rare.

Expedia UK has just come out with a new series of ads, nine of them in total, with puns on the global airport IATA codes and punchlines through passport stamps, all of them on various baggage tags. O&M London, the agency behind the campaign, describes it:  “There are over 9000 airports around the world and every one has it’s own three letter code. Instead of the usual travel cliches, we utilised these humble, but iconic codes to promote a wide range of offers and specials for the Expedia brand.”

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From CreativeReview: “It all started when we saw a woman walking through Heathrow with the word FUK hanging from her suitcase…Turned out she’d just flown in from Fukuoka in Japan. That got us thinking, ‘maybe there are more…Some just happened straight away, some we went looking for like WSH EWE WRE ERE [Brookhaven, Ewer Indonesia, Whangarei, Erave] and SUN SEA SND SEX [Sun Valley, Seattle, Seno, Sembach] as they were travel specific,” they explain.

Loyalties in online booking sites are hard to come by and retain, as consumers jump from one site to other and do tons of comparison shopping before buying, especially for their holiday/leisure bookings. While this may not engender anything close to long term repeat usage, it certainly has the potential for top of mind recall especially if these ads are seen together as a series.

Credits:

Ad Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, London
Executive Creative Director: Gerry Human
Copywriters / Art Directors: Jon Morgan, Mike Watson
Business Director: Stephen Hillcoat
Retoucher: Trevor Qizilbash
Designer: Mark Osborne

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