THE FULL STORY

Our founding team has an unrivalled experience building media businesses inside of retailers, having built one of the biggest advertising operations in the travel industry, before founding Platform 195. This is their story. Started in 1841, Thomas Cook Group plc was renowned as the world’s oldest travel brand, and it was effectively Europe’s biggest integrated tour operator, with an airline, a network of hotels and high street travel agents. The brand had over 20,000 employees and operated across 16 markets worldwide. Back in 2011, the Thomas Cook leadership team realised that there was a significant untapped revenue opportunity to be fulfilled compared to other travel brands that had built successful media businesses, leveraging their brand and in-market audiences. To innovate their legacy media solutions business, they brought in media industry veteran, Stuart Adamson, who had successfully grown media business across Asia Pacific for a major brand for over 10 years. Stuart quickly realised that Thomas Cook’s teams were operating in silos with poor communication across departments. They did not own any ad technology, and campaigns were being created manually with no data collection to measure success. There was stagnant growth for bigger partners such as tourism boards, and the inefficient processes and lack of proper technology didn’t allow to scale the number of advertisers and campaigns being handled. This was particularly true for the mid-long tail of hotel advertisers, that had relatively low budgets, but as whole represented a sizable business segment. ORGANISATION AND MARKET POSITIONING Stuart and his team started transforming the brand’s marketing output through streamlining and reimagining the retail media operations, with an organisational alignment – creating the Thomas Cook Media & Partnerships Group. This centralised all retail media operations in one department, including a self-serve Salesforce CRM integration across markets. Next they introduced and evolved a suite of cutting-edge, connected, data-fuelled omni-channel solutions and platforms. These were implemented across web, stores, inflight, direct and audience extension. From there, the team launched Thomas Cook Audience, Europe’s first retailer trading desk, to handle all retail media transactions off-site. Last but not least, they created an award-winning Hotel Everywhere product for brochure transformation, and launched a self-serve supplier portal for long-tail hotel marketing. SCALING FOR SUCCESS THROUGH TECHNOLOGY These changes required a massive investment in technology, spearheaded by Anthony Bridges (future CTO of Platform195) to fit the specific requirements and use cases of a travel media solutions business. The new platform streamlined all the media processes across the organisation, centralising media planning onsite and offsite, enabling multi-channel delivery and campaign reporting, among other features. CREATIVE SOLUTIONS AND INSIGHTS Through the development of a new creative studio, 1841, Thomas Cook’s partners were offered a full suite of creative solutions including dynamic programmatic display, social media campaigns, influencer marketing, video and TV production and contract publishing, along with research & insight products, offering unrivalled access to the intelligence of Thomas Cook’s data and audience. This allowed the team to scale the budgets from big partners, like tourism boards and big hotel groups, allowing them to take the pressure out of simple booking metrics and also report softer metrics, while establishing a deeper understanding and brand connection with advertisers. INDUSTRY RECOGNITION The major transformations made within Thomas Cook were met with awards and recognition – the process was subject of a Think With Google case study, and the team won Best Use of Data at the 2018 Performance Marketing Awards. Platform 195 is born By 2019 Thomas Cook’s original brochure marketing had been transformed, through a cutting Edge Media Solutions offering, with multi-channel digital campaigns, running over 5,000 owned media, social and programmatic campaigns for more than 2,000 suppliers per year. These campaigns were scaled across 16 source markets with central delivery, ultimately scaling the partnerships division to US$100m turnover & 60% margin, responsible for 30% of the whole group EBIDTA! When in September 2019, Thomas Cook filed for bankruptcy, the team saw an opportunity to launch Platform 195, bringing their knowledge, experience and technology to the travel and retail industries.