Cruise line consultant Bob Dickinson

By Tom Stieghorst

Former Carnival Cruise Lines CEO Bob Dickinson has spent the past year consulting for Carnival Corp.'s four North American brands. His assignment ends May 31. Dickinson took time out from a hiking trip in California's Napa region to speak with cruise editor Tom Stieghorst about how cruises need to be marketed and how crucial agents are to capturing the first-time cruiser.

Q: What's your overall opinion of the current state of cruise line marketing?

A: For the last number of years -- six, seven, eight years -- cruise lines have been under marketed. When the fuel prices went up, the first thing to go was the TV advertising budget.

Social media is fine, but social media doesn't reach first-time cruisers. It's sort of like Al Gore's inconvenient truth -- or in this case, an inconvenient falsehood, that we can substitute one for the other.

Q: Is anyone doing better than the rest?

A: Look at Viking River Cruises and what they've been able to do with Masterpiece Theater.

It's not a huge TV buy, but the visual of whatever it is that is in the commercial fully explains that riverboat experience, makes it aspirational, makes it achievable, makes it so that I see myself in that picture, certainly in the over-50 set, which is who they're marketing to.

Q: What role do travel agents play in connecting the majority of people who have no experience with a cruise to the insiders who run the industry?

A: Travel agents are the biggest gateway to first-time cruisers, and the cruise industry in the last couple of years has not always been friendly to the travel agent -- and in some cases tied their hands. When you're selling three-, four-, five-day cruises where the noncommissionable fare is as much as the cruise ticket and you're getting 15% of $149, why would they sell that? Let them sell Sandals, let them sell river cruises, things where there's a lot of money.

Q: What changes should the cruise lines make?

A: I think some cruise lines have already changed back and have realized that the industry has overplayed its hand. In general, I think all of the brands, certainly the brands I worked with for the past year, are more agent-friendly this year than they were a year ago in terms of their policies and their procedures: pricing, co-op advertising. Every one of the four Carnival North America brands has better policies in place now than they did a year ago.

Q: Did you end your consulting agreement with Carnival or did management?

A: Very candidly, that was their choice. A consulting agreement is like a marriage; if one partner doesn't want it, the other doesn't either, if you know what I mean. If there is a willing audience at some point, I would like to do some [other] marketing or management consulting.

Q: Are you still working with the Camillus House homeless shelter in Miami? What else are you up to?

A: On Aug. 1, we're going take another 100 of the most hard-core, chronic homeless in the city and start them on the process of getting their lives back together. [But] I've cut back my time commitment, from 30 to 40 hours a week after I retired to 10 to 20 hours a week now. [My wife] Jodi and I are kind of on a second honeymoon. [In Napa] we're walking about two hours a day on average, enjoying the restaurants and just hanging out. On June 4, we'll be going to [our] home in North Carolina. We'll be there throughout the summer.

Cruise lines back on the tube with new advertising efforts

By Tom Stieghorst

Cruise lines are returning to TV advertising for the first time since the Great Recession in 2008, giving agents hope that pent-up demand will be stimulated by the media blitz.

Within the past six months, Carnival Cruise Lines, Princess Cruises and Celebrity Cruises have in total pledged more than $60 million to new marketing campaigns that rely mainly on TV.

The latest is Celebrity, which last week launched its $16 million “Remember Everything” campaign on the Bravo channel.
  

A void created by the near absence of the cruise brands on the airwaves has left the industry’s image to news programs and let it slip from consumer consciousness, said Bob Dickinson, a marketing expert and former president of Carnival Cruise Lines.

“The first stake in the ground is: any advertising is better than none,” said Dickinson, who remains a consultant to Carnival Corp.’s four North American brands.

Cruise lines have shied away from the biggest mass-market ad channel for a number of reasons. After the 2008 economic meltdown, many consumers were hard-pressed by job losses and mortgage woes, making a big spend on TV unproductive.

Some cruise lines, Carnival Cruise Lines in particular, developed an alternate media strategy that leaned more toward online and social media as those channels attracted younger and growing audiences.

Finally, the climate for brand advertising was soured by the 2012 Costa Concordia sinking and the 2013 Carnival Triumph fire, which called for a more subdued and policy-oriented marketing response.

The result, according to Dickinson, is that cruises have not been a top-of-mind vacation choice.

“We were not stimulating the demand in a positive sense, and yet CNN and the news [coverage] was very negative,” he said.

Even in an ideal climate, the expense of TV makes it a big risk for all but the largest lines. Magazines, billboards, radio and online are all more affordable, although none connect with a mass audience as well as television, media experts say.

In 2012, Carnival Cruise Lines spent $2.6 million on outdoor advertising, $1.5 million on newspapers, $732,000 on radio and $321,000 on magazines, according to Kantar Media, a media monitoring company in New York.

Only its Internet spend of $10.7 million came close to the $10.8 million it spent on television. But in 2013 the company decided that after the worst of the reaction to the Triumph fire had passed, it needed to come back in a big way to rebuild brand connection.

So it created “Moments That Matter,” a $25 million campaign that featured emotional stories about standout memories provided by past guests and narrated from their point of view.

The ads were somewhat of a departure from the high-energy, Fun Ship themes of the past, a change that Carnival executives said was appropriate to the mood following the Triumph uproar.

Emotional response

For varied reasons, all of the new campaigns, including “Remember Everything” and Princess Cruises’ $20 million “Come Back New” theme, are designed to evoke emotion and include the passenger point of view.

“It seems to be the new trend,“ said Bill Pedlar, a former vice president of marketing at Holland America Line who now runs Knightly Tours, which packages vacations in Alaska and the Canadian Rockies. “It is much more dealing with how you feel, what’s your experience.”

Pedlar said he liked a Carnival ad in which a daughter learns that “work mom” and “vacation mom” are different. “To my mind, that was a good target because it talked to the multigenerational thing,” he said.

Carnival’s ads appeared on national network TV, as do many of those from Royal Caribbean International, which never really stopped advertising during the recession and whose $45 million annual TV budget is the largest by far in the cruise industry.

Smaller lines tend to take a more selective approach. Norwegian Cruise Line ran TV ads in New York and Miami to promote its Norwegian Breakaway and Getaway ships. MSC Cruises advertised on cable channels for the first time in November when it brought its MSC Divina to Miami year-round.

This year, Holland America Line has targeted six cities for an eight-week run of TV spots, said Mark Kammerer, senior vice president of marketing and sales.

While Pedlar said the new, more emotional ads from Celebrity and Princess could draw noncruisers from upscale resorts, Dickinson said it is important to keep hammering home the basics of a cruise and cast as wide a net as possible to get more cruisers.

“I‘m not sure beyond ‘fun’ we want to get too emotional until we know what [a cruise] is,” he said.