XADS

X-Advertising
By Paul Herbig

Extreme Sports (X-games) are now the rage. It is the ultimate in obtaining the more-fickle-than-ever-before consumer’s attention. Just as X-games are getting the attention of the coveted younger crowd, a new set of X-advertising (Extreme Advertising) is being broadcasted to get the younger consumer’s attention.

TRAVEL advertising is “predictable, bland and boring”—unless you’re advertising UK youth package tour company Club 18-30, that is. Unsurprisingly, this is the view of Club 18-30 managing director Andy Tidy, whose controversial advertising created by Saatchi & Saatchi London won a Grand Prix at Cannes last year.
The entry featured a group of gorgeous young things in recreational situations, much in the manner of a Breughel painting, and incorporated a number of visual gags in each poster
Tidy was a speaker at the Cannes International Advertising Festival last week on the topic of ‘extreme advertising’—in which Club 18-30 indulges. The brand has been created around the consumer insight that for the majority of its customers, a Club 18-30 trip means sun, fun and, most of all, getting laid. Most of its marketing, including a variety of ambient and stunt campaigns, focuses on the latter point. For example, the brand ran a pseudo-demonstration outside the U.S. embassy in London recently, with people carrying placards and chanting “We want Bush”. On the back of the signs was a Club 18-30 logo.
“Within the travel industry, very few ‘brands’ exist,” Tidy told B&T. “The Club 18-30 logo adds meaning and completes the ad.”
Interestingly, however, a brand that is so strongly and controversially positioned contributes to a limited lifespan with its consumers. Tidy said there is a three-year window where Club 18-30 is the right travel brand for a person.He says the brand—which is owned by mainstream travel company Thomas Cook, but run by a separate management company at which Tidy is the only person aged older than 27—needs to expand its market to include slightly older travelers (who prefer ‘unpackaged tours’), and further generate word-of-mouth and loyalty .“Traditional loyalty programs are useless,” he said. “The real loyalty is when our customers tell other people what a great time they had and it gets passed on.”
As part of its efforts to generate word of mouth, the company spends time and effort on getting close to its market—and oddly, even their parents. For example, it runs local model competitions in local newspapers—something that is popular with its potential target market—and their parents—who might otherwise be expected to be rather anxious about sending their offspring on a Club 18-30 holiday.
“We have one rep to every 25 guests. A lot of the other companies only have one rep to every 200 guests,” Tidy says. “We’ve very successfully used this tactic for years..We also have an annual reunion—9000 people—it’s the biggest indoor event in Britain.” This is also where the ‘extreme’ advertising approach comes in. Club 18-30’s advertising must be “talked about”.
“It’s very, very important for the advertising to be award-winning,” Tidy says. “There’s no way I want to be a ‘me-too’ brand. It’s got to lead, not follow.We are so close to the target audience that we know if something is working. We know if we’re losing it. It’s anecdotal evidence—if we’re not being talked about.”
Tidy says for the longer-term, there’s little alternative but to launch new brands that target older travelers. For example, Cultura is set to launch at the end of August this year offering partly-packaged tours to Spanish and Italian cities and Prague.“It’s not a package holiday,” he says of the new brand. “You’re opting out, not in.
“We have a new reservation system. We’ll be able to work with partners like EasyJet. It will be very different from Club 18-30. But budgets will never be huge [so we need to] define another strong brand.”
Extreme Advertising—the future?