Title	FRIEND COMPASS
Brand	MOMONDO GROUP
Product/Service	TRAVEL COMPARISON WEBSITE / TRAVEL SEARCH ENGINE
Category	A07. USE OF SOCIAL IN A DIRECT MARKETING CAMPAIGN
Entrant Company	McCANN LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Advertising Agency	McCANN LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Production Company	ESKIMO8 Buckinghamshire, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Rob Doubal	Mccann London	Chief Creative Officer
Laurence Thomson	Mccann London	Chief Creative Officer
Thomas Ilum	Mccann London	Interactive Creative Director
Zoe Sys Vogelius	Mccann London	Creative/Art Director
Steph Hamill	Mccann London	Creative Producer
Jo Howes	Mccann London	Creative Producer
Dan Howarth	Eskimo8	Creative Director
Carlos Hampton	Eskimo8	Technical Director
Duncan Lowrie	Eskimo8	Ios Developer

The Brief

With 46% using mobiles/tablets to book a holiday abroad online in the past year, travel search engine Momondo.com wanted to promote their flight search app with an idea that would disrupt an established and traditional travel search market, and inspire people to book their flights with Momondo. We now have friends all over the world. But what are friends if you never see them? So, we decided to encourage both existing Momondo users and new ones to see their friends, using their emotional, social ties as inspiration rather than highlighting the rational benefits of potential locations as traditional travel search.

Creative Execution

In a world first, Friend Compass connects your Facebook friends with flight searches to the places they live. This unique search feature added value, reward and renewed engagement for existing app users as well as generating new ones, and encouraged travel. It turned flight search social. Users quickly started to personally promote Momondo's app through social media as they shared flights and fun app highlights, driving even more trials and inspiring people to travel. In other words, we turned their friendships into our medium.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Our solution was a campaign centred around the launch of Friend Compass in Momondo's app. By uniquely combining your phone’s GPS location, the Facebook API & Momondo’s search engine, your smartphone transforms into a compass instantly revealing where your friends live and how much it costs to visit them. With filters by price, distance, even weather. The campaign started with a push notification inviting existing app users to try the Friend Compass. Further mobile focussed activity - YouTube pre-roll, mobile in-app/mobile banners, Facebook banners – encouraged & enabled new users to download the app with a few clicks.

Results

Friend Compass generated almost 15 million media impressions and global coverage in the first weeks of launch alone, and ranked as one of the App Store’s Best New Apps worldwide. Launched in 21 markets it’s now a core part of the Momondo business model, producing continuing increases in flight searches. Now, instead of just a few traditional flight search enquiries, Friend Compass users search flights to visit all of their Facebook friends - on average a number of 250+. Furthermore, the positive brand association fostered by tapping into social ties has cemented strong, emotional and continuing ties between Momondo and adventurous traveller users.