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The Aruba Effect

We Repositioned an Island

In 2020, Big Village and Deep Focus collaborated with Aruba Tourism to find ways to increase travel and tourism to the island. However, due to the pandemic, all travel came to a halt, and no one was visiting the island. We had already identified our target audience and knew how we wanted to position the destination. However, we faced a challenging situation: How do we distribute our media budget and reach the target audience, who are mostly influenced by their attitudes?

Tourism accounts for 95% of Aruba’s GDP, making marketing and advertising the island’s biggest expenditure. An entire country was relying on us to deliver a successful campaign.

What We Did:

We had defined our targets based on their attitudes, but we couldn’t access the necessary signals on the platforms we needed to use for activation. Creating proxies was the typical solution, but we considered them unreliable. Instead, we leveraged a common data source that we could use as a crosswalk, and we built a model for each segment using this data.

This enabled us to gain insights and targeting mechanisms that we could confidently use to plan and serve impressions. For instance, it gave us deep media insights that helped us plan and inform creative, as well as serve impressions more accurately. Finally, by mapping the data to Aruba’s CRM, we could personalize outreach to return visitors and measure the success of our efforts.

Watch our webinar recording where go into this process in further detail!

The Result:

In 2022, we launched our new brand campaign, “The Aruba Effect,” to target a new audience and increase both visitor volume and spending on the island. Our campaigns reached segments more frequently, resulting in cost savings for Aruba, while returns reached historical highs and visitation numbers exceeded even pre-pandemic levels.