Japan Airlines (JAL) is using digital advertising to provide up-to-date messaging to consumers as the status of coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to change around the world.
JAL director of global marketing, media and social Jonathan Wan says the airline has been changing its targeting tactics regularly throughout the pandemic.
“What we're seeing is that we're monitoring our upper, middle and lower funnel performance depending on the news that's breaking on a daily basis and to see how it's changing the way consumers are reacting to our messages or to our campaigns,” Wan told the Programmatic Summit in Sydney.
“At the same time, we're also trying to experiment and can change a lot of targeting tactics that we have because things weren't working anymore.”
The travel industryy is among the worst to be hit with travel bans being imposed by a number of nations, holiday-goers cancelling and companies halting business trips.
Airlines including Qantas and Virgin have cancelled a number of their own flights and are offering customers alternative routes.
To stay abreast of the situation, JAL has used real-time reporting to monitor breaking news about the spread of coronavirus in different regions around the world and how it is affecting its campaigns.
Until recent years, Wan says the airline wasn’t well-prepared in the digital advertising and programmatic department.
The airline only launched its first programmatic advertising campaign with Adobe Ad Cloud in 2017.
“From then on we have been running multiple dynamic creative optimized programmatic campaigns around the world,” he says.
“Today we're using a lot of the infrastructure that we have to also make quick optimizations and strategy changes despite the coronavirus.”
These changes include retargeting to people who are searching for still currently searching for flights, as Wan says these customers are likely to be people who have essential travel plans.
JAL is then showing these customers ads that gives “peace of mind” with all the safety procedures the airline has to offer.
Wan says through programmatic and dynamic creative, the airline has been able to deliver ads that are scalable, adaptable, responsive, targeted and personalised.
“This has been helping us a lot right now, with the coronavirus crisis where we see that the old messages that we have are no longer relevant, people aren't traveling right now,” he says.
“We're able to very quickly change the messaging that we have and to give them assurance in a way that they understand and in a way that's relevant to them.”
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.