Flight Centre seizes owned opportunity

Flight Centre seizes owned opportunity

Four years ago, Flight Centre’s global CMO Megan Henderson was tasked with leading a sweeping restructure of Flight Centre’s worldwide marketing operation – centralising five teams into one while overhauling its martech stack and contracts and simultaneously finding efficiencies and growth.

Daunting. But Henderson knew that Fight Centre’s 60 million annual unique online visitors, broad customer comms channels yielding rich first party data plus circa 400 physical stores could help drive the business into fresh territory – adjacent travel market services beyond flights – while generating revenue via owned media packaged and sold to new and existing brand partners.

Enter owned media valuations specialist, Sonder, which dived deep to benchmark and calculate the value of each and all of Flight Centres channels and assets – and highlight where it could go next as an owned media network.

It was really important for us to have our assets audited by a third party so that, ultimately, we weren’t believing our own bullshit … There were things I personally may have slightly overlooked – and it's really given us a whole new lease and opportunity for our marketing mix.

— Megan Henderson, Global CMO, Flight Centre

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Now Henderson aims to make Flight Centre a global case study in how customers, data, physical and digital footprint combine to drive growth, revenue, profit and cross-funnel, cross-category expansion – while landing new paying partners. It’s now rolling out screens across all stores to boost brand building capability and link it through to first party data-powered conversion.

“Having Sonder shine a light on what we could be doing with our digital screens has really fast-tracked the process for us to make sure that our stores have a minimum of two digital screens that I can use for brand advertising with all kinds of partners,” says Henderson.

She’s now ensuring partners think of Flight Centre “as a mass market retailer with millions of customers online and in store… and see that as an opportunity that they can’t get with a standard media buying mix.”

Sonder co-founder, Jonathan Hopkins, says that’s the key takeout for businesses currently leaving money on the table by overlooking their owned media channels and assets:

“There is vast opportunity out there. If you have a website, store network, an email program with a sizeable customer base, then you’re more than halfway there to building an owned media proposition to leverage through your own marketing and with brand partners,” says Hopkins. “It’s all about seizing the opportunity.”

Our fundamental aim is to transform marketing channels into media assets. The process we go through is exhaustive … Not always, but typically, our (calculated) rates will be higher than what businesses are perhaps used to seeing.

— Angus Frazer, Co-Founder, Sonder

What you need to know:

Flight Centre is pushing into adjacent travel categories – and has the data, audience and intent signals across a digital and physical network to attract new partners. It just hadn’t been fully leveraging those capabilities and channels.
An independent audit of those channels via specialist consultancy Sonder helped green light a rapid expansion and acceleration of Flight Centre’s owned media plan.
The aim is to play full funnel across adjacent travel categories, from inspiration and awareness to conversion, for brands that can target customers before, during and after travel.
Now Flight Centre plans to ramp up publishing operations to build out the other side of its broader owned media network – and monetise it.
“Definitely take the time to re evaluate your assets and really think about how diverse and deep your asset pool could be,” advises Flight Centre Global CMO, Megan Henderson.
Sonder’s Jonathan Hopkins sees “vast” untapped potential. Paid media channels “simply don’t have the targeting capabilities, the first party transactional customer data and the business nuances” that owned media networks can harness. “So it does present, increasingly, a full-funnel opportunity, especially in omnichannel businesses.”

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