AA x Secret Escapes
When the pandemic restrictions were relaxed in May 2022, it created a summer staycation surge. The AA challenged us to help more drivers not just travel safely, but to experience more with their car again, so we needed our audience to engage with the AA as more of a travel and leisure brand. We needed to find a partner who could credibly get us there. Luckily, Secret Escapes wanted to add value to their staycation expertise, so we found the perfect pairing.
We created Road Trips, a bookable function on Secret Escapes’ website, positioning The AA as a facilitator of escapism, through Secret Escapes platform integration, video content, articles, social, and paid media. The focal point of the partnership was a branded “AA Road Trips” section on Secret Escapes’ site, which included an interactive map and four pages of beautiful road trip content. In addition, three premium Road Trip videos presented the AA’s Road Trip experience across North Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and the Jurassic Coast, Dorset. The partnership also offered five spontaneous Road Trip upgrades for those who booked trips via The AA pages and mutually beneficial incentives offered to customers of both brands, communicated through HPTOs, email and display activity, and print ads with the Telegraph, which drove activity on the Secret Escapes site.
Our branded AA Road Trips content hub saw 181,622 visitors on the microsite, with 150k of these being unique views, and contributing to a total of almost 23m impressions across display, email, HPTO and top navigation across the campaign. The partnership content achieved an impressive dwell time of over two minutes on average, and the video content saw 600k views in total. The home page takeover and top navigation achieved a 1.81% and 0.05% CTR, respectively, and the partnership emails achieved a 32%+ open rate, and a 1.44% CTR, with the display activity also achieving an average CTR of 0.08%. This campaign generated 181,622 microsite visitors, 23 million impressions, and 150k unique views, bagging us a Campaign Media Award for Best Media Partnership.