Demanding Attention as a Challenger Brand in a Crowded & Competitive Sector
Operating in a crowded online travel and holidays sector, KAYAK, the world’s leading travel search engine, is always looking for innovative ways to cut through the noise and reaffirm its status as a market leader.
With a focus on online video, KAYAK and its agency, McCann Manchester, set out to create bold, memorable work for the UK market tailored to the fast-paced, attention-scarce digital landscape.
Their ambition was to build a distinctive, emotionally resonant platform – rooted in product benefits yet crafted to drive both immediate impact and long-term brand growth.
Consulting System1’s creative effectiveness platform, the team uncovered a category insight: while ads in the travel sector scored well for long-term effectiveness (average Star Rating of 3.1), they struggled with branding, achieving just 78% fluency. Determined to break through a landscape of lookalike ads, KAYAK was open to a bold, well-branded idea that would truly differentiate the brand.
Enter Booksy, an anthropomorphised ‘spokesbutton’ brought to life as a playful and distinctive character. Booksy is the embodiment of KAYAK’s dynamic personality, a fluent brand device and the creative cornerstone of KAYAK’s new platform.
To ensure the campaign would deliver both emotional resonance and commercial impact, KAYAK turned to System1’s Test Your Ad platform. This predictive tool helped refine and validate each creative execution. Early testing showed strong results: the first two spots, Sandra and Alice, scored above-average Star Ratings, very strong Spike Ratings, and exceptional fluency, well above the category norm. Sandra, in particular, ranked in the top 6.3% of all ads tested for fluency.
Building on this momentum, KAYAK and McCann continued to optimise. For their next execution – Heather – they aimed to push emotional effectiveness even further. The team drew on insights from Orlando Wood, System1’s Chief Innovation Officer, whose works Lemon and Look out demonstrate the power of character, humour, and right-brain creative features in driving long-term growth.
As Jordan McDowell, Head of Strategy at McCann Manchester, puts it:
“We challenged ourselves to embed as many right-brained features as possible – elements Orlando Wood has shown to drive long-term growth and emotional impact. Working with a modest budget came with obvious constraints, but it was a challenge we embraced, guided by consumer insight and backed by creative effectiveness research.”
To validate their approach, the team first tested Heather in animatic form. The early indicators were promising: 96% fluency and 80% brand recognition in just two seconds, with strong potential on Star Rating. After refining the edit and producing the final film, Heather went on to achieve the KAYAK platform’s best-ever System1 results.
This marked a 0.8-Star improvement over the animatic version, demonstrating the power of iterative testing and creative discipline. Heather quickly became one of KAYAK’s top-performing ads in terms of Consideration and Favourability on YouTube.
In 2024, KAYAK extended the Booksy platform into radio, applying the same character-led strategy. KAYAK’s radio work ranks among the top-performing travel ads ever tested on System1 – highlighting the campaign’s versatility and cross-channel strength.
The campaign exceeded its commercial objectives, with Predictify attributing a year-on-year increase in total revenue to the creatives. Consideration among YouTube audiences also increased by 25.9% between April 2023 and April 2024.
Across the entirety of the campaign so far, the brand awareness for those exposed to KAYAK’s campaigns on YouTube has increased year on year, with a 20% relative lift in Awareness between 2023 and 2025.
"We’re thrilled with the results of the campaign. Breaking through in such a competitive category is never easy, but we knew there was strong demand for a product and platform like KAYAK. It just needed the right creative strategy to drive distinctiveness and cut through. We’re excited to see this platform continue to evolve and enable Booksy to delight more travel seekers"
Michael Gray Senior Creative Director, KAYAK
From the first animatic to a multi-channel brand platform, KAYAK’s journey with System1 has been defined by consistency, creativity, and confidence in insight-led work. With Booksy now established across video and audio, and results climbing year-on-year, KAYAK demonstrates the impact of emotionally resonant storytelling, strong brand fluency, and a rigorous approach to creative optimisation.
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