The 'Go Europe' sponsorship (goeurope@at next. com) leverages Next Media Group's archived travel stories, which have appeared across its five titles -- Apple Daily, Next magazine, Eat & Travel Weekly and EasyFinder -- over the last 12 months.
M&C Saatchi crafted the sponsorship, saying the aim was to go beyond the usual banner and button ads to create a content-rich travel destination guide for Hong Kong travellers in an environment that has been customised for BA. "We wanted to show that British Airways isn't just about flying to London, but that it has one of the biggest networks in Europe," said Terry Halbroth, M&C's director of integrated services.
"Lonely Planet is no longer the bible for the adventurous traveller, as it is now more mass market. We needed to make this service about offering local intelligence on the ground as written by a local person," he added.
The site features archived content for 20 European destinations, with the plan to increase it to 50 shortly.
The site also includes practical information from visas to the weather and a calendar of events to help with travel planning.
Kevin Huang, CEO of Pixel Media, Next's online sales agent, said the quality of the archives and Next' pool of 980,000 unique viewers made it an attractive media partner. Huang said a series of navigational tools on the Next page had been created to drive traffic to the site. M&C is also running campaigns on MSN, travel portal Zuji and Google, where it has bought about 50 words related to European destinations to drive traffic.
BA creates travel site with Next Group
British Airways (BA) has teamed up with one of the city's biggest Chinese language publishers for an online sponsorship drive to position it as 'the preferred airline to Europe'.