A case solution on Integrated Marketing Communication

1. AIR FRANCE
INTERNET
MARKETING
GROUP 3
Rachita
Swetha
Zacharia
Kern
Swarupa Rani

2. Air France:
 Five French airlines merged to form Air France in 1993.
 Launched its first successful flight to the United States in July 1946 between Paris and New York
city after second world war.
 Served 185 destinations in 83 countries and its total fleet size stood at 383 aircraft.
 Air France and Netherlands-based KLM airlines joined forces and created the SkyTeam global
alliance.
 Air France developed an approach to aircraft fleet management which was consists of two
strategies-
1. Rationalization ( acquiring modern aircraft with similar technical Characteristics)
2. Flexibility (to adjust aircraft delivery dates or change models within a given aircraft family.)
 Air France-KLM continued to grow at the end of 2006-2007.
 At that time global economy grew by 4.9% while airline traffic increased by 6.6%
 Air France revenue grow by 5.1% with increased passenger activity by 5% and with 73.5 million
passengers carried.
Travel Industry and E-Commerce:
 Travel industry was one of the earliest to adopt e-commerce into their sales strategies.
 This helped in easy accessibility to the customer and held huge potential for increasing
businesses’ sales by vastly increasing their reach.
 E-Commerce emerged as a very fast growing sales medium.
 With the adoption of e-tickets, airlines were better protected from many of the logistical
problems.
 travel industry comprised several different types of online service providers-
1. Direct websites (Owned and hosted by the individual airlines)
2. Aggregator websites (offered service beyond flight purchase including hotel and vacation
packages)
3. Metasearchers ( Kind of aggregator websites but did not offer transaction services)
 Between 1996 and 2005 the number of consumers going online to research and book travel
increased by 263% .
 It was uniquely well suited to online purchasing when compared to other segments of the retail
industry.
 According to an estimation in 2005, 32.2 million households in the United States had high-speed
Internet connections.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing):
 SEM was a well-known method of marketing in which businesses promoted their products
and services through targeted placements on Internet search engine results pages (SERPs).
 This provided a highly targeted space to connect consumers to exactly what they were
looking for.
 SEM mainly consists of two things-
1. SEO (Search engine optimization)
- It analyzes the structure and content of a business’s Web site to maximize its readability
and relevance.
It mainly looks at technological part of the websites like URL address structure, Web server settings,
- information architecture, site usability, and text content.
- The goal of SEO was to organically improve a site’s relevancy ranking.
2. Pay-per-click or sponsored search
- Businesses bid on keywords for sponsored link listings consisting of a title.
- Charges were dependent upon the number of times an ad had been clicked on for a keyword.

3. - Cost-per-click could reduce with volume as the search engine provider determined the ad was
more relevant to those keywords.
 The larger search engines allowed for broad, exact, and phrase keyword campaigns to allow
advertisers to cast either wide or narrow nets of impressions.
 Geotargeting had become easier now.
 These campaigns were easily measurable due to the availability of some tracking devices on
internet.
 In order to improve net revenue campaign had to improve on these following things, cost-
per-click reduction, increase in bookings, net revenue, revenue per transaction, return per
transaction, overall performance by engine.
Media Contacts and DoubleClick:
 Media Contacts was the global interactive media network of Havas media.
 It provides data driven media solutions.
 Media Contacts worked to form strategic partnerships with a number of research and
technology providers in order to gain access to granular data sets.
 DoubleClick was an internet ad service company.
 The company’s main product line was DART enterprise which was a web based search
system and was integrated with leading search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.
 In this specialist were able to define budgets and time frames, as well as select cost per
thousand, cost per click, and cost per action pricing models.
Google:
 Pursued an aggressive growth strategy through new product development, acquisitions and
partnerships.
 Generated revenue through
- Highly targeted advertising
- Online search services
 Position of an ad is determined by CPC and CTR
 Uses highly complex mathematical “black box” algorithm.
 Considers more than 500 mn variables and 2bn terms.
 Google Acquired Doubleclick in 2007.
MSN:
 MSN did partnership with other service and content providers in order to drive traffic to
MSN.com.
 MSN received revenue from three key sources; Microsoft adCenter, MSN Shopping, and
subscription based web service.
 As late as 2006 Microsoft had relied heavily on Yahoo for search-related advertising.
 It had rich customer data gathered through its Internet hosting service.
 Microsoft AdCenter used PPC and CTR
 Differ from Google in order to allow its advertisers to target ads to a particular customer
demographic.
Yahoo:
 As the predecessor of Yahoo Search Marketing, commercial Web search services company

4.  Overture was one of the early pioneers in monetizing the internet search traffic.
 Differentiated in SEM by combining ads with content matching
 Context specific content could be linked to search keywords
 Yahoo’s performance was comparatively less positive
Kayak:
 Differentiate itself in two ways
- As an alternative business model from aggregators
- unique technology architecture
 Provided more exhaustive search including the inventory of 551 airlines and 91,500 hotels.
 Its goal is to find and search every hotel on earth, which it estimates at 300,000 properties.
Challenges and probable Solutions:
 The Media Contacts team had only a short time to make sense of all of its research and
determine a way to optimize future campaigns.
 Use branded or unbranded keywords.
 Broad or focused keywords are more profitable
 Which search engine will deliver the most value
Solutions:
 Using both branded and unbranded keywords can be best suitable option for Media Contacts
because it appeared that using branded keywords might bring in more revenue, it was also
apparent that unbranded keywords produced a larger percentage of single-click conversions.
 In Internet one should try to adopt multiple strategies at a single time because in this one can
easily target their customers according to demographics and can do geotargeting and in the
last one should analyze that which strategy has performed well one should focus more on that
strategy.
 It is mentioned that typical internet tracking worked by measuring the last keyword clicked,
and this keyword was credited for the sale conversion so one should try to focus more on
Focused keyword strategy.
 Since air France is working with all top most search engines therefore according to their
target customers they should utilize the potential of search engines like on Google they can
use the strategy of pay per click and sponsored search because on Google it is difficult to
know about the prospective customer.
 While in the case of Yahoo ,MSN and all other social networking websites one can easily
advertise according to their target customer and can do the segmentation Demographically,
Geographically, time wise and Liking wise, so are very important aspects of any internet
advertisement campaign and there are very less chances of loss of money.
 One can utilize its money in a proper and most efficient way and in case of Air France they
should try to do affiliation with Aggregator websites and met searchers in order to increase its
reach.
 They can go for affiliate marketing also by doing partnership with other online travel
booking sites and can maximize their revenue.