Going in-house can feel a little turbulent for advertisers.
But brands, such as Spanish airline Iberia, increasingly want more control over their campaign planning, creative and optimization.
Until relatively recently, Iberia’s workflow was almost entirely manual.
Now, through a partnership with AI personalization platform Clinch and its Flight Control tool, Iberia has been able to bring its media in-house. Flight Control, which is fully self-serve, allows advertisers to manage the entirety of their campaigns, from tracking KPIs to updating creative with real-time data.
On the fly
Rather fittingly, considering the name of the tool, Iberia was one of Flight Control’s early adopters. (The jokes practically write themselves.) But the improvements it has seen since going self-serve are no joke.
Prior to Flight Control, for example, Iberia would create different versions of the same ad for each audience segment and upload them one at a time, Carlos Fernández Suárez, the airline’s digital marketing manager, told AdExchanger.
Flight Control uses AI to make an advertiser’s creative dynamic.
“Every element within the design is now interchangeable,” said Oz Etzioni, Clinch’s CEO and co-founder. One ad can be broken down and restructured into several different ads that are personalized based on the audience segment and media channel.
In the past, it was also difficult to make changes to price or destination – both of which are constantly in flux – within a piece of ad creative. Suárez would have to coordinate with separate design and operations teams to implement those tweaks, which “introduced delays and created bottlenecks,” he said.
Circumventing requests to external teams and automating previously manual tasks has saved Iberia hours of work and allows them to run tests and respond to insights “immediately, rather than waiting for outside teams,” Suárez said.
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The ability to make real-time changes to ads is “critical in our industry,” he added.
But self-service is an appealing option for brands across categories, Etzioni said, because advertisers are increasingly looking to centralize their campaign management on one unified platform.
Earning your wings
Iberia has seen meaningful returns since adopting a self-serve model.
In addition to responding to changes in real time, it’s also able to collect and use its first-party data more efficiently, like tailoring specific messaging to frequent fliers.
Since adopting Flight Control, Iberia has seen an 80% increase in its clickthrough rates on social media platforms and a 2x increase in flight search activity with a high likelihood of purchase.
Personalization matters in any campaign, but particularly in an industry where the target audience is so diverse. Iberia’s customers range from “business travelers to families planning vacations, students, expats, and more,” Suárez said, “so we need a communication strategy that’s both flexible and highly personalized.”
Iberia found that even “small tweaks” to its ad creative, like showing a certain destination image or tailoring a message to frequent flyers, can have a “significant impact” on customer engagement, said Suárez.
But to know what to tweak, advertisers need to know what’s working.
Beyond the usual campaign measurement, Flight Control’s agentic AI has been trained to analyze each element within an ad to determine “what resonates best with who and why,” Etzioni explained.
Brands can take that information to improve their future ad creative and home in on the most resonant messaging.
As Etzioni put it, “We don’t really care who you are. We care what you like to see.”
