Parents Opps: Virgin Voyages taps chief growth officer as spend skyrockets (Score 51)

Sales Lead: Isis Ruiz became the chief growth officer at Virgin Voyages earlier in November 2022.

• Ruiz previously served as the chief commercial officer at American Queen Voyages.
• N​​​​​ow, she will work to "supercharge" Virgin's growth initiatives while "taking the brand to the next level."
• These efforts will ramp up in 2023 when Virgin adds two more ships to its fleet.
• Ruiz's team handles main growth business activities such as paid media, growth strategy, performance and analytics, acquisition email, e-Commerce, the travel partner portal, and the loyalty program.
• The brand will likely:
  • Keep increasing spend
    • It should especially continue ramping up digital/paid social advertising under an additional new DM (more below)
  • Seek new agency partners
• Target demographic: 
  • Parents seeking family-friendly vacations
    • Gen-Z and millennials: Digital/paid social channels
    • Gen-X: National TV channels

Additional recent hires:

• Additional recent appointments include Cindy Gil, who joined Virgin as its senior performance marketing manager in October 2022.
  • Gil last served as the strategic digital marketing and social media consultant at PUSH Ink Digital.

Additional spending insights:

• Broadcast insights (TV ad creative spend, effectiveness, impressions, and performance)
  • YTD spend: Since returning to national TV earlier this year, Virgin has spent approximately $16.6m on this channel. 
  • 2022 ad programming: The brand's 2022 commercials have aired during shows such as The First 48, Beat Bobby Flay, Chopped, Guy's Grocery Games, and Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.
• Digital and social insights (digital ad spend, effectiveness, impressions, and performance)
  • YTD spend: So far this year, the brand's parent company, Virgin Atlantic Airways (VAA), has spent roughly $845.2k on digital ads, a huge increase from the roughly $61.7k spent by this point last year.
  • YTD data: VAA has earned around 95.6m digital impressions YTD via desktop video/YouTube (37%), Instagram (36%), Facebook (18%), desktop display (4%), Twitter (3%), and mobile display (2%) ads.
  • Last year: In 2021, the company's estimated full-year spend of $317k reached almost 4x that of $84.2k in 2020.

Additional agency insights:

• Opportunity: Agency reviews could easily follow this hire, so get in touch sooner rather than later to get on Ruiz's radar.
  • Digital/social media management hires are especially likely considering the aforementioned hire of manager Gil.
• Current agency roster:
  • SwellShark: Media and digital AOR
  • Lucky Generals: Media and programmatic AOR
  • OMD: Media AOR (February 2022)
  • FIG: Creative agency partner

Insight Sources: Broadcast insights estimated by iSpot; digital spend insights estimated by Pathmatics.