As one of the leading restaurant and bar operators in the Middle East and Africa, MORE CRAVINGS BY MARRIOTT BONVOY offers an incredibly diverse range of dining and social experiences across 700 venues in over 19 countries.
MORE CRAVINGS BY MARRIOTT BONVOY and Spark Foundry, their agency of record, partnered with InMobi to drive traffic to the website and footfall into their venues during the festive season, end of last year. This was specifically for their FestiveCravings campaign, which was aimed at driving website traffic to individual restaurant offerings during the festive season. The goal was to position the platform as the season’s culinary one-stop shop at everyone’s fingertips.
The in-app ad campaign targeted individuals between 25 and 41 years old that were most likely to eat at their restaurants and be interested in their festive season offerings, including people interested in dining out, people with travel apps on their mobile devices and nightlife enthusiasts, among others.
Audience-based targeting was combined with polygon-based location targeting to ensure people near MORE CRAVINGS BY MARRIOTT BONVOY locations were shown the right messaging. Time and day targeting was also leveraged to expose users to the mobile ads in the mornings and evenings.
In order for this three-week campaign to really stand out and be memorable, InMobi built out a custom full screen rich media ad unit. Once opened, the ad showed a 360-degree map of the UAE with 10 featured MORE CRAVINGS BY MARRIOTT BONVOY locations shown in street view. Users could then click on the map to visit the website of a particular MORE CRAVINGS BY MARRIOTT BONVOY location.
Promoting their physical locations and driving footfall was especially unique, as their competitors were not taking this approach during the 2020 festive season. This was no small ask, as the campaign ran during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Overall, the campaign was a huge success. From an awareness standpoint, the campaign reached over 640,000 people in just three weeks. The engagement rate was 71% above InMobi’s global benchmarks, while the click-through rate was over 112% above global benchmarks.
The campaign generated over 21,000 clicks off of close to 1.5 million impressions, 375% above the estimated click volume.
The locations that garnered the most interest included Besh at Sheraton Mall of the Emirates Hotel in Dubai and Sacci at The Westin Abu Dhabi Golf Resort and Spa.
In discussing the campaign, the Director of Food and Beverage Marketing at Marriott International EMEA says, "Festive season was a perfect time to experiment with new partners and new ad formats as part of our paid media strategy. Collaborating with InMobi on a strategic level was extremely successful. The creative execution and the incredible level of hyper-localized targeting drove significant reach, customer engagement and measurable footfall to our venues. With InMobil we found a partner that helped us to stand out from the advertising clutter in a creative and impactful way, exceeding our set benchmarks for this campaign."
