The Travel Marketing Podcast

This is the Travel Marketing Podcast brought to you by Propellic, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals, these lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further.

Brennen Bliss

Hello, hello and welcome back to the Propellic Travel Marketing Podcast. My name is Brennen Bliss. I'm the founder and CEO of a performance marketing agency called Propellic. We work with travel and tourism businesses. I wanted to share a cool resource, a colleague of mine, Allison Brown on my team published, it's an AI strategy guide for travel companies. If you want to check that out, just go to Propellic.com/blog and it'll be there. It's one of the first things, most recent things, that was posted. For warned, it's many many thousands of words so go enjoy.

And with that said I'm so excited for today's episode I just got off the phone and recorded an episode with Lottie Norman. She's the CMO at a company called Contiki. So if you're not familiar with Contiki, it's one of the many many brands operated by a parent company called The Travel Torporation and Contiki is without a doubt both in their portfolio and across all of travel one of the most forward thinking brands that we've come across they do an exceptionally exquisite job of targeting travelers between 18 to 35. It's kind of amazing. They're running 350 tours, 75 countries, I think every continent, if not six of the seven. And the best part about it is they've been around since 1962. So they've done an exceptional job of keeping up with what's happening and what's important to the younger audience over that very, very long period of time, over 60 years. So with that said, I'm going to jump right in with Lottie and enjoy. Well, thanks for joining me, Lottie. I'm really excited to get started.

Lottie Norman

Thank for having me, I'm excited to be here.

Brennen Bliss

Absolutely. I was mentioning right before we started recording that we're kind of on like a streak of the tours category. I'm excited to continue it with Contiki, which as many people do know, it's a TTC brand. It's one of the best known, if not the best known, younger generational travel companies. it's managed to really successfully stay relevant for a younger generation for quite some time.
I'm curious how you do that. How do you stay in a level of relevancy for a constantly changing demographic because you're not growing with the same people?

Lottie Norman Brennen Bliss

We're not, and that's the biggest, I'd say the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity at the same time, yeah, guess, so Contiki has been around for 60 years. So yes, you're correct in saying probably the most well-known, but also I like to say the original in a lot of ways as well. And I guess sort of when we started 60 years ago, we had in our DNA, this sort of adventurous spirit and kind of a startup mentality of understanding what young people wanted. And as the years have gone on, obviously, the way young people behave, their needs, their wants, their channels, everything has changed. But what we've done is it's been really critical that we evolve with them. And so I like to call Contiki, rather than a travel brand, we call ourselves more of a travel community. And the reason I say that is so much of our community is yes, it's young people today, because we are exclusively for 18 to 35 year olds.
But within our community, we also still have our travelers who are in their 60s and 70s who traveled with us back in the day, who have now passing on that wisdom and their experiences to friends, family, daughters, granddaughters, grandsons, etcetera. And it really is this community of what they got from the experience of traveling the world of Contiki. So, you know, I also refer to it as a little bit of a cult. If you've traveled to have Contiki once, it's the cult of Contiki. And everyone has a story to tell.
And it's really important for us to just listen to these stories and listen to our community and growing there. So there's always something new in marketing, particularly in travel marketing. There's always a new channel, a new platform. You should be on a new way of talking to young people. There's a new trend, a new fad. But for us, it's about not just jumping on things for the sake of it, but just really understanding that audience. So we do a lot of social listening. We do a lot of insights testing. We do lots of focus groups with young people across the whole 18 to 35 year old age range. And we're really just trying to build something which is relevant. And that has been the case back in the sixties through to today.

Brennen Bliss

Yeah, it's funny. First off, you mentioned building a cult.

Lottie Norman

Every grain of salt…

Brennen Bliss

It's just another word for culture. Come on. It's okay. Yeah, it's interesting. The traveler demographics, you mentioned that, well, I don't know where I saw this, but I was doing some research beforehand. But is it true that about 45% of travelers are coming solo?

Lottie Norman

Yes.

Brennen Bliss

So the campaign work that y'all do is exceptional. Typically when I talk to companies, I get a lot of strategies and tactics do really strong campaigns. So I want to talk about things like the visited countries map. I want to talk about things like ¨just bring you¨. The ¨just bring you¨ thing is the easiest sequitur from what I just said though. So tell me about ¨just bring you¨.

Lottie Norman

Yeah, so ¨Just Bring You¨ actually is the second iteration of a campaign we did pre-pandemic, which sadly didn't get the kind of airtime we had hoped because of sort of how the world went. But it was a campaign which was born out of a notion of find your people. And the creative insight was that many people joined Contiki's from different walks of life, different interests, different experiences. And what's unique about a Contiki experience is that it's this shared travel, it's the sharedness of experiencing things together, seeing things together, but also those kind of in-between travel moments. So we wanted a campaign which really captured those in-between travel moments. But also, from more of an operational perspective, also pushed the message that with Contiki, you don't need to do anything, you just bring yourself. But you can also bring your authentic self.
So the campaign had many layers to it. The first iteration we did with a number of influencers from across different regions, where we worked with influencers who weren't in the travel space. They were in more niche passion points. So we had a guy from the UK who is notorious for being the most swiped right guy on Tinder, who was a real character, right the way through to… we had a musician on board and then we had a fashion influencer on board.

Brennen Bliss

Is swipe right the good one? Is that mean people like you or no?

Lottie Norman

It means that people like you. So yeah, he was in demand.

Brennen Bliss

He´s the winner of the World Sexiest Man Competition.

Lottie Norman

Basically, the modern equivalent. So we shot that one and it was on one of our new trips, which was Rome to Barcelona by train. And it was a great story. And we had real authenticity, it was shot like a reality TV show, turned into an eight minute video with smaller segments. And sadly it didn't get the air time it wanted. You can head to YouTube and search ¨Contiki Find Your People¨ and you'll find it.

Brennen Bliss

Yeah, want to talk like, so a couple of things you just said, pointing out for people, this is the interplay between marketing and product. So you have a trip to Barcelona via train. So leaning on slow travel, leaning into eco-friendly travel with those two things. And then I also love what you're doing with sober curious travel, right? This whole concept that there's definitely an increasing trend of people who don't drink and having like a whole trip style around that is fascinating. How has that taken off so far?

Lottie Norman

It's an interesting one. It's a movement we've seen and I do call it a movement because I don't believe it's a fad and it's something that's just been on our radar for a while. And it's, I think, sort of young people today redefining what they want from their travel experiences. And this is one part of it. Sober Curiosity is a really interesting space to play because I think for us, it was very important that we weren't alienating anyone.
It's more giving an option of it's not anti-drinking, it's not anti the parties, it's not just exclusively for people who don't drink. It was really creating a space where everyone felt welcome, regardless of what they wanted to do. So helping them find their people, giving them the same trips which Contiki is known for, just with small tweaks. So we may build on the series as it develops.
We have had a lot of interest. It is one of our most searched experiences when they get to the website. So we know it's getting a lot of traction. I think it's just launched for us and it's been really worthwhile observing how that audience views it. So we're getting lots of feedback of what type of experiences do they want, but the first feedback we got was that they didn't want anything which felt alienating or was exclusive to them.
They wanted just the same Contiki everyone else gets, but just with a few experiences tweaked. That meant they didn't have to drink. So we launched it initially to make a bit more noise about it with our UK and Ireland trip. And the reason being that's the destination that everyone associates drinking culture with. I'm British, so I can say that.

Brennen Bliss

Beer and whiskey. There you go.

Lottie Norman

Exactly. You know, on that trip, we go to the Guinness store house, for example, but the Guinness storehouse also sells 0 % alcohol. So it really was about raising awareness of sort of a more of a challenge mentality. Can you do the UK and Ireland without drinking? And can you experience sort of a true Contiki at the same time? So this is kind of how we started it, but who knows.

Brennen Bliss
Can you? What's the verdict?

Lottie Norman

Absolutely you can, that's the verdict. I can't say I've done it. I won't say I have. But no, look.
In all honesty, it's not, I'm very keen that this is not seen as a trend or fad we've jumped on. It really is a behavior and I think wellness space in general with travel and particularly young people is only growing as young people want different things from their travel experiences. The world's very different for them as it was 20, 30 years ago. So it's important to understand what those motivations are and what they want when they're trying to travel or experiencing travel.

Brennen Bliss

Yeah, I think every travel company is talking about how do we stay relevant as the generation changes. One thing that I noticed, travel is a slow industry to move. It is the slowest. I mean, I feel like if travel companies needed to print things, they'd be using dot matrix printers. It's interesting because you have to do the exact opposite. You're literally, and there's not a lot of research because you're targeting an age where they're barely legal to research. If you go a little bit younger, you can't gather information the data privacy laws, at least in the States, prevent. I think it's 15 and under or something like that. So you don't have that much lead time to prepare and make something relevant.
I've got two more questions that are more campaign specific than I want to get kind of into strategy and all, so y'all do video really well. And I have a follow up on that. I want to talk about the Millie Ford video specifically. This is a really clever concept. You said you're 60 years old. You founded in the sixties.
And you hired an influencer or you worked with an influencer to travel as if she was in the sixties. How big is your marketing organization that reports to you?

Lottie Norman

So reporting to me, I have a team for Contiki of about 20.

Brennen Bliss

Okay. So this is a cultural thing. People don't naturally do this unless there's a culture of doing this. How do you keep your team thinking of things like that? How do you inspire them to be creative in such a way?

Lottie Norman

So my mentality, my background is I came from creative agencies where to win pitches, to stay relevant with clients, you had to be thinking fast and not afraid to fail. And that's the mentality which has really sort of stuck with me as I've progressed and is very much sort of at the heart of my leadership style as well. I sort of try to empower the team to be very much about taking risks, thinking of these crazy ideas, think big and we'll see if we can always dial it down, but we learn more from the ideas which don't land than we do than the ones that do. And so when you start to foster that sort of environment of creativity and bravery, that's when you get these ideas, I think. And you know, the second part of that, there's one part of the team and getting the ideas and getting that ideas factory really sort of churning. But the second part is obviously stakeholder management and being able to sell those ideas in. And that I think comes a little bit easier with a brand like Contiki, which, as I said at the beginning, has innovation in its DNA and is known for this. You're just constantly adding to the mentality of everything the brand stands for, that we are relevant, we do understand young people, we're not a group of old people just creating trips pretending we know what's happening. We are part of the community.
I think, you know, a bit of a long-winded answer, but when you foster this sort of notion of ideas and ideas can come from anywhere, I don't have an ideas team or a creative team, which exclusively comes up with the ideas. They literally can come from anywhere. So we work hand in hand with our product team. We work hand in hand with our operations team. We have a strong connection, which has grown in recent years with our trip managers who are running the trips on the road.
And so many ideas come from those guys. You know, they're the people actually taking these trips and experiencing them with young people today. And some of our campaign ideas actually come from them as a thought starter. So yeah, I think that's kind of the mentality and the culture we've tried to foster here at Contiki.

Brennen Bliss

It's clearly working. As you said, I come from a performance marketing background. That's sometimes the hard part is finding something to actually create, to put the media behind or to invest in distribution with like one of the other examples that we came across and we were doing some research for this was the visited countries map, which is more of an interactive tool. And before I go into this, my philosophy on testing things, which is basically what you're talking about. It's like if two out of 10 work, you're doing really well.

Lottie Norman

Exactly, exactly the same.

Brennen Bliss

I have a friend of mine that really talks about this concept of alpha and beta. So if you look at just the market performance, beta is if you're doing as well as everybody else and to get alpha, you have to test things to exceed market performance. You have to test things and two of those 10 things working is enough to with the long tail. If it works really well, justify the cost of all the other ones that didn't work on the visited countries map.
Was that one that worked or didn't work?

Lottie Norman
Has massively worked, but I guess it is a good example of underplaying it at the beginning. So the idea came about for anyone who hasn't seen the visited countries map. It's a way of being able to kind of scratch off like you can on the scratch maps, how many countries you've visited across the world and it gives you a score.
It was really an idea which was born out of our social media team of how many creators and influencers we work with and also just our community who are commenting on how many countries they've visited. And we started to sort of keep an eye on this trend and see that it's a bit of gamification amongst the travel industry of which influences have done the most trips and is there a scale of the more exotic to the sort of more mainstream.
So we built on 6.2, which is our editorial platform. This piece of tech is pretty low maintenance. It wasn't a heavy lift, didn't cost a lot of money. We worked with an in-house developers, which we work with and we kind of got it sort of off the ground in sort of a down and dirty way. It really wasn't a big deal was, let's just get something up and see if people want to use it. And from there, it's just really taken off. It's kind of grown legs in terms of the role of it and how it can be utilized further. And what I mean from that is we're now using it from a data capture perspective. We're now using it to really connect with product and push people to products and destinations they haven't yet traveled to so we can get them sort of deep into our website at different points. And then also the gamification side of things, we've been really able to customize it and start to build in leaderboards, which we can sort of gamify some of our creators and our reps on, we use with some of our trip managers on the road. And then the most recent adaptement we've done is International Women's Day, where we've actually been able to customize it so that it cools out all of our female led experiences around the world. So again, it's a really interactive way of us being able to talk about product and storytelling but also in a way that is a bit more engaging than just kind of broadcasting editorial broadcasting video. So yeah, it's really grown legs. It's been a really great development for us.

Brennen Bliss

I'm at 10.26 of the world cover. What's your score? you remember?

Lottie Norman

I´m 13.

Brennen Bliss

Okay. I'm slacking. What's the highest score that you've seen?

Lottie Norman

The highest score I have seen is 21.

Brennen Bliss

Okay.

Lottie Norman

And that was from one of our operations managers who has moved through the business.

Brennen Bliss

Is it a land mass base or is it just the number of countries?

Lottie Norman

It's the number of countries.

Brennen Bliss

Okay. Got it. Cause I was going to say like, I don't necessarily want to go to Russia, but that would really increase my score.

Lottie Norman

Don't worry, you don't have to go.

Brennen Bliss

I got it. I can have the same impact with Turks and Caicos as I can with.

Lottie Norman

Although that's an interesting comment because it's definitely something we want to start to explore, giving sort of different weightings to different destinations is based on how obscure they are and so is their popularity. That's probably something we're developing in the coming months…

Brennen Bliss

Well, if you were to work on that, could even lean into the responsible tourism aspect and give credit to, know, exactly like do you end up going to the center of everything or are you exploring a part of the world that fewer people explore to distribute that tourism?

Lottie Norman

Exactly. And that really helps them with a lot of our messaging, second destinations and off season as well, which is great.
Brennen Bliss

For sure. Which is honestly the best time to travel.

Lottie Norman

I couldn't agree more.

Brennen Bliss

Okay, so getting more specific and diving a bit deeper into strategies and tactics. So influencer marketing, if you were to give it a percent of the effective marketing that you do, you do more of it than most brands and travel. So what percent of your marketing success just anecdotally is coming from influencer marketing?

Lottie Norman

I would say about 40%. And the reason I say that is I think we need to be clear on the definition of influencer marketing. So, you know, a few years back, I would say we were doing sort of 70 odd percent influencer marketing. We launched things like the road trip, if anyone remembers, of getting to big names on trips and documenting that. Even the Find Your People campaign I spoke about was using some sort of pretty big, proliferant influencers.
Where we've gone in recent years is really moving away from your traditional influencer model and looking, I mean, everyone's kind of saying it, the sort of the nano-influencers and the micro-influencers, but really looking for ambassadors of the brand. So we really, we don't work with people on a one-off basis anymore. They really have to buy into the brand. If you look at some of our recent work, there's a guy, TikTok influencer called Nathan Lust, who dances his way around the world. Pretty crazy content, amazing content. We've now taken him on five or six trips, I think, and he just does his thing in those destinations. But he's got affiliate codes. He truly loves the brand. Like he's a Contiki fan boy, absolutely. And you know, he's an advocate for us and speaks about us and because he wants to, we don't pay him to.
And I think that's really been the shift for us is this kind of building a network of ambassadors in the influencer space who, yes, have audience, but actually do truly believe in us. And I think that's a big shift, particularly with the Gen Z audience of authenticity. Millennials didn't care as much, but Gen Z is straight for us.

Brennen Bliss

It's so interesting to see just the transitions of culture. It's just more visible to me because I'm actually still in your demographic target audience.

Lottie Norman

Lucky you.
Brennen Bliss

Well, in certain respects, it's good and other ones, makes it more difficult. But I find that for the first time, I'm very much seeing a very different culture of the people that are adults that are younger than me, which I hadn't experienced before. And it's interesting just to understand marketing to them really foundationally is it's different, different messaging, different tactics, looking at platforms. So I imagine y'all do some paid media.

Lottie Norman

Yes, we do.

Brennen Bliss

It's a little bit. I was like a begrudging yes. What channels are you using and what's working and what's not.

Lottie Norman

So, again, I guess the shift has really happened over the in recent years. We've always done a lot of digital. You can't be a youth brand without spending big on sort of digital media. The channel shift happened regularly. It moves at speed. Obviously, at the moment, TikTok, huge for us. But I think it's about understanding the role of those channels in our media mix more than anything. So we have our bread and butter channels very much. which is obviously Google search, Instagram still huge for us. Surprisingly, Facebook still delivers from a conversion perspective, even though I'm constantly told it's sort of the dying platform for the Gen Z. But at the same time, you know, TikTok is probably where we spend the most money now. What's really interesting for me is the shift outside of the digital media space. So we've actually really started doing a lot more top funnel true brand awareness. And we're spending a lot more on out of home, which is great. I mean, as a marketer, it's always great seeing sort of your work come to life and big billboards. Who doesn't love that? And buses and all.
I absolutely love it. The amount of images I have of me in Sydney outside the bus is crazy. It's really working. And I think it is that sort of being present in people's everyday lives and being outside of that is very competitive in the digital media space. And I think particularly Gen Z, they don't want an ad, they want to be part of a brand and they want to understand what that brand is going to do for them. And so I think those subtle reminders and being part of their everyday commute or on their way to school is what's really making a difference. I'd say out of home at the moment is doing a lot for us. We're doing a lot more…

Brennen Bliss

On the out of home piece before we jump to the other channels. you say it's working. that through like incrementality testing, MMM? How are you measuring that?

Lottie Norman

Yeah, it's a tricky one to measure at the moment. Yeah, MMM, absolutely. But also brand recall just in general, we're seeing sort of share of voice really increase on the back of that. And then the knock on effect of the brand marketing performs well then that improves your performance marketing as well, so hand in hand, we don't see them in silos.
The other channels, which are a bit harder to measure, but we are starting to dip our toe in the water again things like sponsorship of festivals. Just sponsored a big festival in Australia called Laneway, which has been really good. Again, it's just that being relevant, being part of people's and offering some sort of value as well. So music goes hand in hand with travel. We have something called a Contiki Day Song, where every day on your trip, you're given a song at the beginning of your tour. And that same song plays at the start and end of every day.
And that song becomes so sort of symbolic of that experience and that travel experience. And then when you hear that song, it brings back all those memories.

Brennen Bliss

That's brilliant.

Lottie Norman

It’s brilliant, isn’t it? It's so good.

Brennen Bliss

That's like Jedi mind tricks right there. That's amazing.

Lottie Norman

I mean, you have to hope that you've got a trip manager with good music taste though. Some of them have been questionable.
For me, I think if we ever put out on our social channels, Memories of your Contiki Day song and the stories are just amazing. No one can hear that song and not remember what they were doing, where they were, how they felt at that moment. So we're trying to do more in the media space, connecting kind of those big emotional plays and the trip experience back to kind of the media landscape, your podcasts, your festivals, your Spotify media buyers, that type of thing.

Brennen Bliss

So I'm kind of curious, one of the unique challenges that multi-day group faces is trip filling, right? Where the trip's going to run. What's the minimum number? Will you reschedule trips if it doesn't get a certain number of attendees or are you kind of fixed?

Lottie Norman

It depends. Look, there's a lot of factors. There's a lot of factors impacting our load, things such as where the trip is, would it operate a loss type thing? Can we make it happen? Can we move people from a different departure? It's the same trip and put them on the same one. So there's lots of factors at play for us. We don't sort of have a set criteria. It depends.

Brennen Bliss

From a marketing standpoint on the performance side, you've got more granular control over bidding, things like Google ads. Do you have some sort of dynamic integration with your trip capacity to drive that?

Lottie Norman

That would be amazing, but sadly we don't. It's definitely being discussed and the reason being there's just a lot of nuances for us depending on where our trips operate. Europe is a totally different sort of beast compared to our trips which operate in Asia and some of the operational factors. So it is a little bit tricky to kind of be as sort of clinical as plugins. But yeah, I mean, we want to obviously get to that stage but it's still quite manual for us at the moment.

Brennen Bliss

Actually, at ITB, I found a company that had been doing something like that, which is the reason I was curious to see if people... You're the second. I'll send you the information.

Lottie Norman

Please do. Please do, yeah.

Brennen Bliss

So looking at... See, we talked about out of home, we talked about Google, we talked about TikTok, Meta, anything else that's kind of unique and interesting. Like, are you doing anything on Reddit, anything across? Because there's other channels for sure. One of the things I see is lots of concentration in what's working. Like, you know, Google is the slot machine of all slot machines, right? It's amazing and also can be trouble. Exactly. Any other channels?

Lottie Norman

Yeah, I mean, we're always looking at sort of more of these high usage channels, which really impact the everyday, I guess, in that youth space. So we are doing a bit more in the podcast space, sponsoring podcasts. They've obviously seen such huge growth. They do a good job of that repetition of message for us…

Brennen Bliss

Yes, the propelling travel marketing podcast brought to you by Contiki…

Lottie Norman

Exactly.
What else is really big for us? You know, we have explored things like Reddit before. We were always up the gaming to another one. We've been doing quite a little quite a bit in that space, less so from a pure play paid media, more from a partnerships perspective, looking at how we can connect the two a little bit more. But we were always open, you know, there's new platforms in this demographic constantly. So our media mix needs to evolve and we've always got the pot of money aside for kind of more of those innovation plays. Cause I think I remember what was a year ago when B-Real was the be all and end all. And we jumped on and we had a campaign and everything and it had its moment and it died.

Brennen Bliss

We did. A cold hard day.

Lottie Norman

It really did. I love B-Real as well. I'm quite sad about that.

Brennen Bliss

Is it like 5 % 10 %? What percent of your budget are you using for like?

Lottie Norman

We pour around 10 % of the marketing budget for innovations. But that's not just media, just a caveat. That is to be able to jump on things as they emerge, to be able to run a campaign, to be able to do and keep our innovative spirit alive, I guess.

Brennen Bliss

That's the exact percent we recommended them. That's hard to do to convince a board to convince a C-suite. I mean, you're in the C-suite. So you're talking to peers, but it's not easy to get buy-in on saying, okay, we've got these things that we know produce a six X row as, but we're not going to use this 10% for that. But what if you could find an eight X, right? And that's the one.

Lottie Norman

I oversee all of the TTC tour brands. It's a very different conversation for some of the other brands, exactly to your point. I think for Contiki, the reality is the youth space moves quickly and we've only got a finite amount of time with these people from Gen Alpha to Millennials at the moment in the mix. And we have to capture attention, convert them, keep them coming back during this period. And so we've got to be on those channels and they're a fickle audience.

Brennen Bliss

Yeah. Yeah. If you look at like Trafalgar and Grand European, it's going to just be a very different approach, right?

Lottie Norman

Exactly.

Brennen Bliss

So I want to be respectful of your time. We've got two more tactical things, one more high-level thing, and then, then I'll let you run away from me as fast as you want.
So tech stack, what tools are you using? I mean, we talked about MMM. What do you rely on every day?

Lottie Norman

So social listening, as I mentioned at the beginning, I think we've got a number of sort of insights tools and it's something we're investing more and more in is being able to truly understand what our audience wants and when they want it. So we do quite a lot of work with our SEO agency on intent-based planning as well, really just trying to understand that landscape and where the sweet spots are. I think in terms of other tools, the biggest issue at the moment in space, probably in all travel marketing is being able to adapt personalization. Because I think you mentioned it earlier of travel can be as an industry quite slow and personalization is the reality of what people are expecting.
So that's very much our focus from a tech stack is how do we improve that daily? How do we bring more tools in? How do we work with our partners? That has to be sort of at the heart of sort of our tech stack strategy moving forward.

Brennen Bliss

That's funny. I hosted a roundtable with Phocuswright at their US conference in Phoenix back in November. And the first thing I said, the first prompt I had for the group, about 30 marketers sitting in the room was, okay, we've been talking about personalization for about 20 years. Who's actually doing it today? And like 2% of the people in the room had a strong implementation of that. So you've got 20 people on your team?

Lottie Norman

Yeah.

Brennen Bliss

What is the structure of that and how would you suggest forming a team as a marketing leader in the space?

Lottie Norman

So we're a strange structure, a great structure, like to think. So I look after a team called the Marketing Lab. So it used to be Contiki Marketing Lab. It's now a multi-branded TTC Tor Brands Marketing Lab. So we operate like an in-house agency. And the reason being is it allows us to drive on a global level, the strategic direction and oversee the channels. So I have a team which looks after, you know, social, CRM, editorial.
We've been predominantly quite production driven as a marketing division because of that team structure. So years ago, it was born out of sort of brochure production back in the day. And then it's moved from kind of print services into the video side of things. We have an in-house production team who do all of our video content. We do occasionally work with videographers for shoots and people on the road. And occasionally on some of our bigger campaign work, we work with some reliable sort of production partners. But I would say a solid sort of 85% of what comes out with Contiki branding on it has come from this team.
And the reason being is we're the ones sort of living and breathing the brand and then we can do things at scale and at pace and is more cost efficient than using third party agencies as well. So yeah, we are this marketing hub really focused on sort of our team mantra is make Contiki famous, which is very much around that kind of creative spirit, sell more trips and make us relevant.
So they're kind of the pillars, which as a team we live by and how the team is structured to support that as well.

Brennen Bliss

That's wonderful. That's a lot of really, really good information. Thank you, before I ask my last question, for continuing to up-level these conversations and adding a lot to our listener base, which I learned that ITB is actually bigger than I thought it was. So I'm happy about that. I thought I had all but like two listeners and it was my husband and mother. I found out my husband doesn't even listen to it. So there you go. It was down to one.

Lottie Norman

Down to one.

Brennen Bliss

There's a lot of marketers listening to this to round out our conversation. What's one piece of advice and what's the biggest mistake you've made in your career that you were able to recover from?

Lottie Norman

Ooh, they probably go hand in hand. Best advice is something I was told back in the day by a quite well-known sort of creative director in London, agency side, very much a sort of 90s mantra, creative director, old school, but was around, don't be scared of taking risks ultimately, I guess. Don't wait for permission. I think I was definitely very guilty of this back in my sort of early stages of my career of I wouldn't want to speak out, I was scared of saying the wrong thing, asking a dumb question, not knowing the full picture of things. And as we spoke about a little bit earlier, I think it's these bold ideas which get you somewhere, whether it's that they succeed and you have a great campaign which wins awards and you can sort of hang your hat on and sort of talk about for years to come, or it's the 90 % which don't succeed, which you get so many learnings from, which you take into other aspects of your career.
And I think I was always very scared of sort of asking for permission, feeling like it's too big an idea. It doesn't quite land. I need to make sure I've got all the answers to all the questions and all the possible scenarios before I push forward. And I think, you know, in any industry it moves fast in this space marketing is a fast paced world.
And I think it's the ideas which you don't present and you don't take forward, which are the ones you regret rather than the ones you did and failed. So that's definitely my biggest advice. Be bold, take a shot, learn from every win and every misstep. I think the biggest mistake isn't failing. It's not trying in the first place. So yeah, that would be my advice. And then I guess to your second question of…

Brennen Bliss

The fun question.

Lottie Norman

Fun question, actually I can't think of it. I think it would probably be to the same point. I've had some great campaign ideas and been presented some great campaign ideas from my teams over the years. And because of certain leadership in businesses or clients in agency side, I've made the wrong call in not putting them forward. And then we haven't moved at pace and someone else has done it. And I've also therefore disheartened some of the team by not taking that risk and not taking the risk on their thinking when they've had the guts to sort of ask me that question or present something. I think as a leader, that's something I'm very mindful of now in my position of nurturing a team, empowering people to ask the right questions, to move forward and to be confident. I'm very much a door wide open leader. I have another mantra other than make Contiki famous of don't be a dick, which is just be human at the end of the day.

Brennen Bliss

It's so close to the end without the explicit symbol.

Lottie Norman

It had to be done.

Brennen Bliss

Yet another one. All right, there we go.

Lottie Norman

But yeah, I think ultimately, you know, being a good person and that's sort of come into my leadership style from very much some of the mistakes I've made over the years and also some of the leaders I've had where they haven't sort of listened or taken the chance or understood there's a rationale behind things. They're the ones which are sort of some of my biggest mistakes, which I've now turned into a positive and I think have made me a better leader and I like to think I nurture good ideas here and quite obvious in some of the work we put out which is, I feel proud of.

Brennen Bliss

Amazing. Well, thank you so much.

Lottie Norman

No worries.

Brennen Bliss

Is there any way that people can keep up with what y'all are working on at Contiki?

Lottie Norman

Absolutely. So follow our channels. I'd say our biggest channel these days is TikTok. So give us a checkout. A lot of the team I've been talking about in this podcast are all featured there. We do a lot of office talks. So you can see some of the faces behind the brand there as well. So check it out. And then you can check out our trips out at contiki.com.

Brennen Bliss

Thank you so much for joining me today.
Lottie Norman

No worries at all.

For more empowering ideas, visit Propellic.com. We're on a mission to create more diversity and thought for the planet, and dedicated to helping brands both large and small increase their reach through intelligent travel, transportation, and tourism marketing. P-R-O-P-E-L-L-I-C.com.