MSC Cruises Performance Recovery
Revamped MSC Cruises' Search and YouTube strategy by reorienting investment around destination demand, first-party audiences, and clearer geographic intent
Metrics & Impact
Summary
This engagement delivered a 15% year-over-year improvement in ROAS while rebuilding performance momentum and client confidence. By restructuring how we thought about destinations, audiences, and geographic intent, we transformed MSC's performance channels from a source of concern into a strategic growth driver.
As a challenger brand competing against category leaders like Royal Caribbean and Carnival, MSC Cruises was facing declining sales efficiency and slipping ROAS across key performance channels. Media structure had become fragmented, audience targeting lacked precision, and the client relationship itself was under strain due to performance uncertainty and limited strategic visibility.
I led a full restructuring of MSC's performance approach across Search and YouTube:
- •Introduced an optimization layer centered on destination-level intrigue—aligning media to the ports and experiences consumers actually shop for
- •Restructured campaigns to emphasize origin-city demand signals, improving geographic targeting precision
- •Refined audience targeting to lean more heavily into first-party data, improving relevance and efficiency at scale
- •Reset the client relationship through proactive communication and transparency—clearly articulating what we were doing, why we were doing it, and maintaining open, consistent dialogue
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