Skyscanner hires Newhaven and FeatherBrooksbank
Global flight search site Skyscanner has appointed Edinburgh-based agencies Newhaven and Feather Brooksbank to handle the company’s first ever TV advertising campaign.
Newhaven will manage the creative development of Skyscanner’s first offline campaign, working with Feather Brooksbank on media planning and buying. The agencies were appointed following an accelerated pitch process involving five other agencies, all London-based.
“We’ve gone at this pretty hard and fast” said Skyscanner’s Commercial VP, Frank Skivington. “The aim is to air the first phase TV trial in Scotland in January, so we were looking for an exceptional team that could work with us to make this happen without compromising creativity. We saw some very talented agencies and we are extremely happy with our choice and very confident that we have the right team on board to make this a success.”
Skyscanner currently has over 7 million visits to its site each month, built mainly through online channels, word of mouth and PR, but has never previously run an above-the-line campaign. The first phase is a TV campaign in Scotland to trial the strategy, following which a plan and budget will be put in place to roll out across all UK media regions.
“Skyscanner has been growing strongly, with year on year growth of over 80%, but now we are ramping that up even more and pushing hard to create a global travel brand” said Frank Skivington.
“The Scottish TV trial is only the first step in the process. Ultimately we hope that advertising will be a key element in our UK and international marketing programmes.”
“It's great to be appointed to an exciting brand embarking on its first above the line communication and getting really involved at the outset” said Newhaven’s Jonathan Shinton.
“We're looking forward to launching the new campaign idea but in the meantime we have a fair amount of production work to get on with.”
“Everyone at Feather Brooksbank is really excited to be working with such an innovative brand, right from the start of their above the line communications. We're looking forward to helping Skyscanner grow and reach the potential of everyone’s ambitions and can’t wait to get cracking with the campaign,” added Alastair Taylor of Feather Brooksbank.