Results and Effectiveness

Reached 1 million visits in 3 months, beating our 6 month KPI in half the time Achieved a staggering 96% average monthly increase in online room bookings Increased searches for ‘Traders Hotels’ in Asia by 71% since November 2011 (above seasonal trends) Engaged visitors, with 1 in 3 visitors returning regularly to the site Received unsolicited press and partnership opportunities from organizations like the BBC and Cathay Pacific, underscoring the relevance of the content

Creative Execution

We shifted media investment from category-generic TV/offline advertising to a long-term branded content platform, BeReady.net. We produced and implemented Be Ready across three platforms – website, tablet, & mobile – and curated and developed the content to provide business travelers with only the most useful, timely and relevant information, thus delivering on the brand promise of “smart choice." With most of the budget spent on production, we had to be very targeted with our investment. We used the following tactics to deliver a Cost Per Visitor 76% lower than target: 1. Paid Search and Social placements reached our target when they were searching for this exact content. 2. Contextual and search ads on mobile phones and tablets reached guests on the go. 3. Dynamic display ads pushed out new site content on contextually relevant sites. 4. High impact site overlays on www.beready.net website advertised the apps and newsletter.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

On a budget of only USD$1.5m, our task was to motivate global business travelers to reconsider Traders Hotels, an undifferentiated hotel brand that had lost relevance. A brand re-invigoration as the “smart choice” was underway, but would take time to achieve. To measure our success, our key KPIs were to reach one million business travelers within six months and increase bookings. The Traders guest doesn’t stay in lavish hotels on corporate junkets – they’re all business, working the night before, to “be ready for tomorrow.” Saying we were the “smart choice” for business hotels in Asia wouldn’t be enough. We had to prove it. Through research, we discovered the Traders Guest spends hours searching, reviewing, and deciphering large volumes of information to simplify their business lives. We saw an opportunity for Traders to make this process easier by developing a branded content platform specifically for business travelers – www.beready.net.