Marketers trading and Businesses

study of Clipper Ventures
The brief

Commuting return and forth the daily grind, or perhaps wanted to be running outside of the whole thing to sail the seven seas? That’s what Ian Dickens, marketing director, Clipper Ventures, was relying upon when he devised a rail and tube station poster campaign to draw in newbie sailors to a Clipper Across the World Yacht Race.

Founded by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, who in 1969 was most important man to sail non‑stop and single‑handed all over, Clipper wanting to devise the first choice market its 2011-2012 race.

“Previously we’d only run adverts ınside the Sunday Times and similar newspapers,” says Dickens. “We were successful, but were always recruiting right up to the wire. We wanted a replacement campaign to very much capture people’s imagination as they simply went about their daily lives ın order that we could extra service the race spaces a step forward before.”

The strategy

Having vast potential target market, Clipper needed a campaign that is going to reach and tempt all kinds of people. “The only thing that unites our sailors is their spirit of adventure,” says Dickens.

“We needed a campaign that would appeal to all ages and demographics. There is not any typical individual who might join one among our races. You couldn’t place them into an ABC1 type label. Our crews are richly varied and stuffed with colour – perhaps you may have an agency leader sailing accompanied by a taxi driver, a nurse or even a college student,” he tells.

The 2011 race is definitely the eighth circumnavigation run through the company which consists of 10-strong number of 68-foot racing yachts. “Having run the races since 1996 we all know why people enroll in – these are hungry for that life-changing experience and a lot of adrenaline,” says Dickens.

It is not, however, a feat to your fainthearted. Often tackling choppy seas and adverse weather conditions, crew members may join for the whole race, or for one or more legs of this journey. The yachts sail of your UK to Brazil, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, China, California, Chicago, Canada and Ireland.

But Dickens knew he wasn’t necessarily speaking with seasoned sailors either. “About 40 per cent with the crews that join have not stepped foot on your yacht before,” he states. “We thought i would run a simple yet striking poster campaign designed to grab people during that very moment they are in need of an escape route belonging to the endless routine of office politics and board meetings.”

With a little more budget to play with compared with previous years, Clipper planned a national railway and underground station poster campaign at beyond 600 sites round the country. “Using mainline railway stations and therefore the London Underground ensured our message would reach a diverse cosmopolitan audience,” says Dickens. “We did find the CEO who was commuting in first class, sailing while using student down the carriage, the mum sitting close to him and also the train driver who delivered all those meals to figureout.”

Both the media buying and the advert creative were done in house, with Dickens with the exceptional small marketing team of four tweaking the ideas used by earlier advertising campaigns.

“In previous adverts we had tried to say too much,” says Dickens, to make sure they thought i would keep it simple this time, choosing an aerial shot of one of the yachts ploughing throughout the sea with several people on board.

The slogan, “Challenging week ahead?”, played over the disparity between the working week being gone through by the commuters who would see the advert on the tube, and the experience being had with the adventurers depicted on the advert. Beside each determine the boat was a job title, from city trader to mechanic to housewife, with one final figure nearly the question “you?”.

“Since the economy has dipped people have had a growing wish to experience more than just the day to day,” says Dickens.

“We wanted to tap into people’s imagination. We wanted commuters to realise that this time last year those sailors in that photo were exactly where they were, looking at the poster,” he says.

The poster campaign generated just over 3,000 website enquiries about the race, with people explicitly stating they had learnt about the campaign from seeing it advertised on a poster.

The two other largest channels through which people heard about the Clipper race were word of mouth – more than 2,700, which is the highest number Clipper has ever recorded for this route – and the Clipper website, which Dickens says saw an 80 per cent growth in traffic compared with the run-up to the 2007-2008 race.

Having begun the campaign in November 2009, the number of sign-ups in August 2010 was double the largest number that Clipper had received in the same time period with previous campaigns.

“We are now eight months ahead of where we have ever been before,” says Dickens.

“Two of the legs are already sold out. We had people calling us up, while staring at the poster, with the railway announcements clearly blaring in the background. They were literally stopped in their tracks,” he says.

Dickens says the poster campaign delivered the immediacy and reach that Clipper hoped to achieve. Having taken part in the race himself, he feels passionate about communicating the potential of this “life affirming experience” to others.

“When I joined the company two years ago, I changed the creative to include a stronger call to action and to really engage with people going about their day-to-day business. The goal was to unleash a dream, and with 80 per cent of the 2011-2012 race already sold, it appears to have worked well,” says Dickens.