The Challenge
The client, a UK-based ferry operator serving routes between Great Britain, Ireland, and mainland Europe, wanted to improve the efficiency of its marketing spend across services with very different demand patterns.
Budget decisions had historically been made at a national level, with limited visibility into how performance varied by route, season, or departure port. Offline media, especially Regional Press and Out-of-Home, was concentrated around ports such as Dover, Liverpool, and Calais, based on legacy assumptions about traveller proximity.
With operational costs rising and price sensitivity increasing, the business needed a clearer view of how marketing investment translated into bookings, revenue, and load factor at route level, and where spend could be redeployed more profitably.
The Solution
We implemented a marketing mix modelling framework to measure the incremental impact of both online and offline media across key routes, while accounting for seasonality, pricing, and external market forces.
The model combined media inputs such as TV, print, paid search, paid social, discounts, and promotional pricing with control variables including fuel prices, GBP–EUR exchange rates, weather, and macroeconomic indicators like inflation. Operational costs were also built in, allowing performance to be assessed against breakeven load factor thresholds rather than media metrics alone.
A detailed geographic analysis of booking data showed that offline spend was overly concentrated around ports, while bookings were actually clustered around major urban centres such as London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. These insights supported a strategic redeployment of Regional Press and OOH into urban catchments aligned to route-specific demand patterns. We then used scenario planning and budget optimisation to determine the minimum investment needed to sustain load factors above 67% across routes with different seasonal profiles.
The Impact
The revised media strategy improved both efficiency and commercial performance. After some offline media was reallocated into urban centres, passenger and vehicle bookings from Regional Press and OOH increased by 14%, with a corresponding 11% uplift in revenue attributable to those channels.
At total media level, marketing ROI improved by 19% as spend moved away from low-return placements and towards routes and periods with stronger marginal returns. Average customer acquisition cost fell by 12%, and budget efficiency improved enough to keep load factors above the 67% breakeven threshold for nine months of the year, up from six previously.
Route-level optimisation proved especially valuable in shoulder seasons, where differences in price sensitivity and demand elasticity helped the client reduce unnecessary spend on highly seasonal routes while sustaining profitability on year-round services.
Key Takeaways
Route-level MMM – Revealed meaningful differences in media effectiveness that national-level reporting was hiding.
Geographic booking analysis – Challenged long-held assumptions about proximity-based offline media placement.
Commercial ROI framing – Incorporating operational costs reframed ROI around load factor breakeven, improving decision-making.
Budget optimisation – Aligned marketing investment more closely with seasonality and route-specific demand patterns.
Tools and Techniques
- Geographic booking analysis and catchment mapping
- Marketing Mix Modelling
- Budget optimisation and scenario planning
- Data & martech audit
- SQL for data extraction and transformation
- R for modelling
- Snowflake (Data warehousing)
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