Thomson Add Video to Newspaper Articles

As we are all aware Thomson are one of the largest travel agents on the high street, along with strong competitors such as Thomas Cook. Over the last 10 years it has proven very difficult for high street stores to maintain high figures, due to most holiday makers now booking a holiday online, and looking for the cheapest deal. With this in mind Thomson have created a fantastic new marketing technique, this is explained in the article below:

Thomson has become the latest in a growing list of tour operators to run an interactive print campaign, which allows customers to view video content on their smartphones.

Viewers can watch videos of hotels and resorts by hovering their smartphones over images in newspaper ads, which have been created using Aurasma technology. The Aurasma app recognises images and symbols and uses them to deliver images, webpages or audio.

Interactive ads featuring Thomson's Sensatori hotel in Tenerife have appeared in the travel section of the Times and The Guardian and are scheduled for future use, said the company.

Saga Holidays became one of the first UK travel companies to use the Aurasma technology late last year, closely followed by Kuoni.

Thomson said videos would continue to be used in future print advertising and, if successful, it plans to roll out the technology across further communication channels including retail POS, brochures an direct mail.

I think this is a fantastic idea that has been used for Thomson, it will be very interesting to see the results from this campaign  I hope that this proves to strengthen the high street stores. It will also be interesting to see what the next step in advertising will be, as well as which travel agent will be leading it. Ice Lolly have already set up a new campgain using well know celebrities, so what could be next?