Madden Media partnered with Kentucky Department of Travel on a cooperative rich media banner campaign in fall 2010. The program goals were:
• Provide an affordable way for Kentucky destination marketing organizations to appear on premium websites and benefit from branding and traffic.
• Target travelers in Kentucky and surrounding states who match the state’s demographic priorities.
Madden Media designed three sizes of expanding video banners that gave equal representation to each of the five participating destinations. The rich media ads ran in September and October on Trip Advisor, Virtual Tourist, and Collective Network. With a total of 1.47 million impressions, each advertiser’s effective CPM was only $2.56. A cohesive landing page on VacationFun.com afforded bonus exposure and traffic.
In addition to design, Madden executed media research and buying, collection of sponsor and advertiser materials, programming, tagging, and daily optimization.
Campaign traffic—consisting of direct banner clicks, view-through visits tracked with spotlight pixels, and landing page clicks—totaled 5,448 visits. The program beat several of DoubleClick’s 2009 benchmarks for expanding banners with video, travel category. The best result was for average expansion time, which was 63.81 seconds. Compared to the benchmark of 3.74 seconds, this campaign delivered a 1,606% better metric.
This cooperative program succeeded in stretching the budgets of all advertisers, giving them significantly more online marketing impact than they could have achieved alone.
