There has never been a more successful Switzerland Tourism ST ad. The 11 million views puts the 2017 summer spot well ahead of all other ads. For comparison’s sake, the 2016-17 winter ad “Bruno” had about 5.6 million views and the 2015-16 winter ad “Buzz Aldrin” had about 3.5 million. To be considered a view, the ad must be watched for at least 30 seconds.

90% of these views were generated via “True View Ads” (video advertising). “The average viewing time of the ad is about one minute and five seconds. This is a strong indication that the video clip worked and it achieved the desired attention,” said Christoph Brülhart, head of Digital Marketing & Consulting at ST. “Although the ad can be stopped after five seconds, more than 25% of our target group watched the entire ad.” At the end of the ad, the words COME AND FIND IT AT MYSWITZERLAND.COM appear.

YouTube award-winner

Many potential guests followed up on these words: in July 2017, the national tourism website posted a new monthly record with more than 3.2 million visits. The total number of visits in 2017 was 30.48 million. ST used Key Stories to supplement the summer ad. Key Stories are visually attractive summer experiences with a combined image-text video format. There are 13 of these summer stories on the website MySwitzerland.com and they were also used for Facebook canvas ads (fullscreen ads in the mobile Facebook newsfeed). The result: 36 million impressions with a good average viewing time of 18 seconds, an engagement of 4 million likes, commentaries and link clicks. In addition, the Key Stories were shared 9,400 times, and approximately 65,000 people clicked on the canvas ads to go directly to MySwitzerland.com.

The ST team received a YouTube award (German) for the most-watched Swiss ad in the second quarter of 2017.