How The Travel Corporation won Black Friday through unified paid and organic media

The Travel Corporation (TTC) is a global travel group headquartered in London and offering holiday and tours packages worldwide. For Black Friday 2025, TTC partnered with Brave Bison to drive growth across three owned TTC brands with distinct propositions: Trafalgar Travel (guided tours across 70+ countries), Costsaver (value-led, customisable holiday packages) and Insight Vacations (premium, small-group experiences across five continents). In a highly competitive sales period with rising media costs, the challenge was to deliver record performance without relying solely on late-stage, offer-led activity.

Objectives for our Black Friday campaign were:

Achieve at least double the ROAS for Costsaver YoY compared to 2024

Achieve a minimum of 50% uplift in ROAS for Insight Vacations YoY compared to 2024

Double brand search impression volume for Trafalgar Travel

Ensure all three brands outperform prior-year Black Friday benchmarks within their respective category segments

Brave Bison introduced TTC to the Media Lift Effect: a proprietary framework designed to unlock stronger performance by unifying paid and organic media across the full funnel. Rather than treating awareness, consideration and conversion as separate disciplines, the Media Lift Effect ensures each stage actively strengthens the next.

Planning started months ahead of Black Friday, with demand built early through organic, creator and upper-funnel paid activity, trust and intent nurtured mid-funnel, and conversion activity focused on scaling warmed audiences efficiently during the sale. By the time Black Friday arrived, demand already existed; the sale amplified it rather than creating it from scratch.

Audience strategy and creative direction were powered by AudienceGPT, Brave Bison’s AI-driven audience insights tool. By replicating TTC’s core traveller personas across the three brands, AudienceGPT enabled always-on access to motivations, behaviours and objections, ensuring messaging and creative concepts were rooted in real audience insight. This allowed strategy and creative to be tailored by brand while operating within one unified media system.

Execution centred on creative diversity and continuous testing, with organic content acting as a live laboratory for paid media. Across Trafalgar Travel, Costsaver and Insight Vacations, Brave Bison produced a wide range of formats designed to perform at different funnel stages, including:

Organic-style Reels and UGC-led video

Creator and partnership content showcasing real travel experiences

Greenscreen and voiceover formats to explain value propositions

Social proof, product-led and offer-first statics for conversion

Destination- and trip-specific creative to increase purchase clarity

Organic and creator content was launched first to test hooks, narratives and formats. High-performing assets were then amplified through paid media, ensuring spend was focused on proven creative rather than assumptions. This approach allowed TTC to prime audiences well ahead of Black Friday, increasing familiarity and trust before introducing offers.

By unifying paid and organic planning, creative rotation and channel roles, the Media Lift Effect positioned TTC brands in a stronger competitive position during peak auction periods. As a result, Black Friday activity focused on scaling volume efficiently, not compensating for cold demand.