Saudia

The objective

Grow full-funnel brand health for Saudia's summer destinations campaign while expanding visibility beyond core local markets

Saudia launched its summer destinations campaign to strengthen brand health among Saudi Arabian audiences during the peak travel season. The campaign aimed to build awareness, deepen destination consideration, and drive meaningful traffic and engagement by promoting summer travel offerings through innovative TikTok solutions.

With a strong existing baseline in-market, the opportunity was not only to maintain awareness but also to expand beyond Saudia’s core audiences and capture new demand. The strategy therefore combined premium reach-driving placements with engagement and traffic objectives, while using TikTok-first creative to make destination storytelling feel relevant, native, and attention-grabbing for users actively exploring travel inspiration.

The solution

Combining creator-led creative, premium full-funnel media, and a first-mover Category Search Hub test in MENA

Saudia activated a full-funnel media mix designed to drive coverage across the customer journey. The campaign ran from 13 June to 5 August 2026 and used five formats — TopView, Top Feed, Pulse, Video Views, and Traffic — to balance reach, engagement, video views, and clicks. This mix helped the brand scale visibility while supporting both upper and lower-funnel objectives.

Creatively, the brand adopted a creator-led approach to produce TikTok-first assets that showcased destinations in a native, platform-relevant way. Creator content proved especially effective, with Abdullah’s video delivering the strongest performance at an 8.22% VTR and 2.09% CTR. This reinforced the campaign’s broader learning that platform-native storytelling and creator participation can drive stronger engagement outcomes for travel brands.

A standout innovation was Saudia’s use of Category Search Hub. As the first airline brand in MENA to test the product, Saudia activated relevant travel category keywords alongside destination-specific search terms aligned with its summer promotions. Users searching for these terms were served tailored video content for each destination, helping the brand increase visibility across relevant travel searches and connect audiences with destination content during active exploration.

This combination of premium media, creator-led content, and search-led innovation gave Saudia a diversified campaign structure spanning awareness through to traffic. It also created a blueprint for future regional travel campaigns, particularly for brands looking to connect broad brand-building with more intent-driven discovery on TikTok.

The results

Strong full-funnel scale and engagement, with promising early results from Category Search Hub.

Saudia’s summer destinations campaign delivered broad scale, reaching 23M users — equivalent to 60% of Kingdom MAUs — and generating 1.3M clicks at a 0.97% CTR. Across the campaign, Saudia recorded 135.8M impressions, 7.7M 6-second video views, and $210K in measured spend. Premium placements played a major role, with TopView delivering the highest CTR at 3.12%, while Traffic achieved the lowest CPC at $0.07.

The Category Search Hub test also showed encouraging performance. The activation generated 320,409 impressions, with 42% of impressions coming from Keyword Amplifier, alongside 360 new followers, a reported 60% engagement rate, and a 0.29% CTR. Together with a 14% lift in keyword association linking Saudia to multiple travel destinations, the campaign demonstrated how search-led exposure can complement broader brand and media efforts.