Carnival Cruise Line Selects TBWA\Chiat\Day NY as New Creative AOR

Carnival Cruise Line has selected TBWA\Chiat\Day New York as its creative agency of record, following a pitch process that was led internally by the brand.

The agency is charged with elevating Carnival’s brand platform to create a distinctive and disruptive position for the brand with a plan for growth. Carnival’s collaboration with TBWA\Chiat\Day New York will launch during the cruise industry’s “wave” season that begins after the December holidays and runs through March, with the first work landing either late this year or early 2025.

“We wanted an agency partner who could really collaborate with us and think about how we continue to disrupt and really transcend the category. That led us to a search, and it led us to TBWA. Their focus on disruption and thinking about pushing against the conventions of the category we felt would be really interesting for us,” said Amy Martin Ziegenfuss, CMO at Carnival, who has been with the company for just over a year.

With Carnival’s 50-plus year heritage, TBWA\Chiat\Day New York saw a great opportunity to take an iconic brand and help create a successful platform that would propel its next 50 years.

“It’s a dream opportunity for a partner. Great work comes from great partnerships, and I think Amy has a proven reputation of being exactly that,” Emily Wilcox, CEO of TBWA\Chiat\Day NY, told ADWEEK.

Wilcox added that the pitch, which featured multiple agencies, was collaborative throughout, with plenty of feedback given so TBWA could refine its pitch.

Over 50 years of cruising 

Carnival helped start the cruise marketing push, launching the first-ever national advertising campaign 40 years ago with Kathie Lee Gifford singing about the joys of cruising.

The brand, which claims to sail more guests than any other cruise line, most recently worked with Anomaly, which used “Fun” as a theme in ads featuring Shaquille O’Neal as the brand’s CFO (chief fun officer). O’Neal will apparently continue being a brand ambassador, and Gifford is still on board with Carnival.

Now, the iconic brand is looking to anchor its place in culture for the next 50 years, with the goal of speaking to new and current customers. 

“We’ve been having lots of conversations about what’s next for the brand, and the Carnival brand is just over 50 years old now. After 50 years of being leader, you want to make sure we’re thinking about what’s next and writing the next chapter,” said Martin Ziegenfuss, who, before coming to Carnival, was svp of global enterprise and brand marketing for Hilton Worldwide, and before that was with Choice Hotels.

Disrupting the cruise industry

It’s not easy to disrupt a category, but Carnival and TBWA\Chiat\Day NY plan on doing so. The brand will use its broad fan base, which Martin Ziegenfuss said is “absolutely passionate about this brand in a way that is absolutely a dream for marketers,” as a guide for much of the communications.

Wilcox set up the challenges and steps needed to create marketing success. They first need to capture and articulate what it is that the most loyal and enthusiastic fans know and feel about the brand, and then figure what is preventing people from choosing the brand and the barriers that marketers need to overcome.

With an iconic hospitality brand like Carnival, much of the work is capturing the stories and data from the cruisers and translating it into coveted experiences.

“If we do our job really well, we’ll capture the energy, the emotion and the end benefit of what a Carnival Cruise actually brings to people, which is much bigger than just a travel experience or a vacation,” said Wilcox.

Martin Ziegenfuss said a lot of the cruise line’s fans are very active in social, so the team is leveraging that social listening, as well as using proprietary first-party data and tools to better understand consumers and find out how Carnival can fit into their lifestyles.

While Carnival has moved on from Anomaly after a successful run starting in 2017, it will continue with Shaq as a brand ambassador and will still play off the concept of fun.

“Fun is definitely in our DNA. We were literally called ‘the fun ships’ in the beginning for a reason, and that goes back to our origin story. It’s all about the energy and what we bring to the table,” said Martin Ziegenfuss.

Details of the deal were not disclosed but the 2023 estimated spend for Carnival Cruise by COMvergence is $76 million, which includes traditional and digital media.