Why is this work relevant for Direct?

Our challenge was to address an epic flu season in Australia and target all Australians to come to Priceline for their Flu shots – when Priceline was seen as a place for makeup over pharmaceutical help.

Background

In 2018 we experienced the worst flu season in almost a decade. In 2019, Priceline wanted to help protect Aussies from this outbreak by providing their annual flu shot, however they’re mostly known for cosmetics and beauty. Aussies needed to know they could turn to Priceline in their fight against the flu. Despite a 72% reduction in media budget YOY, Priceline still had to drive as many flu shots as possible We were tasked with the challenge of increasing Priceline’s online bookings for Flu Shots. However, we knew that online bookings for Flu appointments at Priceline were low, we also knew that research shows only 17% of people scheduled appointments online. This led us to a new insight: The flu shot is not a planned priority for most Australians – it’s a decision triggered by an instant need. Objectives: drive 55k store visits and 15% increase in flu shots YOY.

Describe the creative idea (30% of vote)

We discovered that if we were to chase the online bookings only, we’d be missing out on a larger group of potential customers who don’t book online. This inspired us to challenge the brief. Our priority was effectiveness & efficiency, meaning our goal was to drive as many flu bookings as we could. With this in mind, we re-assessed our ‘online bookings’ objective as we knew from our insight that consumers are more likely to get a flu shot on the spot, rather than planning ahead with an appointment. We went to Priceline and worked with them to determine that we’d switch our optimisation tactic to store visits over online bookings. Ultimately our mission was to protect all Australians from the Flu, and we knew that driving them into their local Priceline was the most effective way of doing that. So the idea became simple: Flu Shot on Demand

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

Our strategy was to drive customers instore, regardless of whether they had an appointment, ensuring we were speaking to them throughout the entire journey, minimising our chance of losing them. Targeting Priceline’s core demographic W18+, overlaid with In-Market Flu Shot affinity & Health related interests Our job was twofold – firstly we needed to make sure that consumers didn’t just think of us for their latest foundation and understood we were THE destination for flu protection, amongst very competitive headwinds. Secondly, we needed to make sure when they were ready to get protected, we were there on demand. Our media approach was developed to speak to consumers whenever it was convenient for them, activating in location-based environments, making going in store easy. We highlighted Priceline as the destination for Flu shots by implementing a localised reach campaign - capturing their instant need and driving them in store, on the spot.

Describe the execution (20% of vote)

With limited budget we had to develop a smart & integrated media plan that would achieve our ambitious goals. Over the pre & peak flu season (1st April – 15th June), we drove high awareness nationally of Priceline’s Flu offering using YouTube Trueview so that a broad number of consumers knew we were the destination for flu protection. We then complemented it with location extensions to help customers find the nearest Priceline store via Google Maps, ensuring they knew where to go when they were ready. In addition, we used Google Local campaigns to capture lower funnel traffic and those actively in-market. This allowed us to follow valuable in market customers and capture volume when they were already in location based environments like maps and Google Business listings, as well as across the display network and YouTube, always optimising to in-store visits.

List the results (30% of vote)

Despite people thinking of Priceline as a just a place to get makeup, we effectively let them know Priceline was THE destination for the flu shot and protected nearly 190,000 Australians from getting the flu from April to June of 2019 – more people than the whole of Townsville/Cairns/Darwin! Despite having a 72% reduction in media spend, our approach to provide Flu Shot on Demand led to an incredible increase of 23% year on year, which exceeded our goal by 15%. Our target was to motivate 55,000 people in-store during our campaign in our effort to drive traffic, and we smashed this goal – more than doubling in-store traffic to 120,000 people. To top it off, Priceline held the highest share of search terms against “flu shot” during the peak Flu season, outshouting our biggest rival who outspend us 4 to 1