Germany-based, family-owned confectioner Ritter Sport has teamed up with digital marketing agency Echolution for a targeted content campaign to promote its Vegan Travel Edition tower.

Over three weeks in  April, Echolution created tailored digital ad campaigns which ran within consumer-facing online travel titles including Conde Nast Traveller, TripAdvisor, Timeout, Thrillist and The Times travel section.

The activity was a unique concept for Ritter Sport, which invested in ad spend with the objective to raise brand awareness.

Echolution used mobile data to target the main traffic routes into departure airports to make sure the brand campaign was seen immediately before the passenger started their journeys. 

As well as destination-specific advertising when consumers searched ‘what to do on holiday’, and when booking flights, the agency also served ads close to flight times with geo-targeting across train stations and focus airports. 

The top tourist destinations in terms of traveller engagement were Ibiza (1.65% click-through rate), Paris (1.46% CTR), and Hong Kong (1.45% CTR).

Madrid, Istanbul, Thailand, Barcelona, New York, Zurich and Antalya also saw good engagement, with CTRs of between 1.24% and 1.05%.

“Our brief from Ritter Sport was to create awareness among future travellers of the Vegan Travel Edition tower,” said Eamonn Leacy, Echolution Partner. 

‘Contextual’ targeting

“The whole concept was to target travellers leading up to and at the point of travelling out of three major UK airports [London Heathrow, London Gatwick and Manchester].

“We achieved this by contextually targeting and placing the brand advertising campaign within relevant online destination travel content that travellers would be researching and then viewing, while travelling to or from these airports. 

“The numbers speak for themselves. We achieved 2,400+ unique creative variations which were targeted against hyper-relevant travel content.  

“We generated ads for 115 tourist destinations and achieved high engagement rates of 0.68% CTR per ad and 82% viewable impressions overall.”

Jan Pasold, Managing Director, Global Travel Retail Ritter Sport, added: “We are happy with the results of this highly targeted and travel-centric ad campaign.

“With this level of engagement, we know brand awareness among travellers will have increased. The next stage is joining the dots with our travel retail partners in key locations in order to make the most of the geo-location capabilities.”

Earlier this year, Ritter Sport added a new Hygge-inspired Travel Retail Edition Winter Selection Tower 5x100g set to its range of 40-plus chocolate varieties.