By continuing to support our partnership with Concours d'Elegance at The Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island, we strove to increase awareness of our brand story among the VIP participants who attended the event and also generate excitement to those who were able to follow along on social media. Furthermore, our goals were to maximize reach - measured through impressions, interactions, and engagements with our social content. The Ritz-Carlton is committed to creating indelible memories for its guests, and our Instagram Carousel aimed to build on this mission by creating an opportunity for our audience to share in those experiences and see become inspired to attend in 2019. Whether participants attended the event, or through the immersive social opportunities, our overarching goal was to enable our global audience to connect with and evolve their view of The Ritz-Carlton brand.
Our key message throughout this activation was that at the heart of The Ritz-Carlton brand is the commitment to helping our guests create remarkable memories for life, especially through the activation of our brand hashtag #RCMemories which was used throughout all our social content (like the Instagram Carousel) and visible as a special display in the VIP area - The Chairman's Suite. Our approach to reinforcing this message is what differentiates us in the marketplace. Any brand could say they are committed to creating memories and amazing experiences across the globe, but The Ritz-Carlton helped people achieve it by coordinating a multi-discipline activation which encompassed social, digital, and our physical presence at the event.
The Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island has been hosting Concours d'Elegance for the past 23 years and year over year we have seen the potential these car events have to drive luxury experiences with a curated audience and increase loyalty with our VIP customers. At The Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island we saw an opportunity to support a hotel with a brand-level activation that speaks to relevancy, being modern and contemporary, in the more traditional space of a car show. As part of our partnership, we took over the VIP hospitality of the chairman suite, entertaining over 250 VIPs throughout the weekend. It included florals, decor, and all these touches that helped create this true luxury experience. As the event experiences unfolded we published live content on our owned social channels that culminated in an Instagram Carousel to drive additional awareness to our targeted consumers that couldn't attend the event this year.
This ad unit was designed to effectively reach and impact the global, affluent consumers that form the core customer base of The Ritz-Carlton. This is refined by targeting parameters in Instagram & Facebook to narrow our reach by income and certain interest patterns that are universal across this segmentation. However not all Ritz-Carlton consumers have an interest in car shows so we refined this audience further by interests related to this specific experience. Our targeting also aligned with marketing segmentations for Celebrators & Sunseekers, a subset of our global affluent demographic that specifically enjoy sunny resorts and / or luxury events.
Research was conducted to determine the best ways to engage guests on social to make sure the story of The Ritz-Carlton was being told and consumed by our intended audience. We conducted multiple studies using Cortex, a content analysis platform that uses AI and machine learning to determine the assets that are most consumed by our target audience from the perspective of a luxury hospitality brand. This included research on what subjects and colors performed best on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter across the luxury hospitality industry. In addition we analyzed other carousels by luxury brands to see what they were doing to tell their story, what worked and what didn't, to maximize the consumability of our carousel. In order to create excitement and promote participation, we used Facebook's targeting and rich advertising capabilities.
Through the main social placement, our Instagram carousel, our goal was to generate awareness about this event and the special elevated experience provided to both attendees as well as potential attendees within our targeting scope. We more than exceeded our expectations. The Instagram Carousel generated 1.9 Million Impressions at a frequency of 2.37. Which means we were able to repeatedly message 800K of our most relevant and interested consumers that would be likely to purchase tickets in 2019. Even though it was secondary we also drove 1.5K link clicks back to our main website from those target consumers.
Our main goal was not around revenue but to promote awareness, inspire memories, and deepen engagement with our target consumers. This included furthering our brand story in the minds of event attendees as well as generating excitement for next year's event.
