Carnival Corporation announced plans to further optimize its advertising spend during its second quarter earnings call on July 26.

CEO Josh Weinstein said that the company’s existing marketing campaigns have helped drive awareness and consideration, resulting in an 87 percent increase in search performance compared to 2019.

Following the success of its existing campaigns, Carnival will continue to invest in advertising to market more aggressively, he said.

“Our lead generation efforts are also working with a 60 percent increase in paid search clicks over 2019, which is nearly double the 35 percent increase just last quarter. To accommodate this success and our increased demand profile, we’ve grown our sales and sales support staff by over 50 percent in recent months. At the same time, we can see the impact it is also having with the trade,” Weinstein said.

“And of course, our advertising investments benefit not only us but our trade partners as well. By any measure, our decision to increase our investment in advertising is paying off. The sequential improvement in these important KPIs suggests the strength we are seeing in demand will continue.”

Weinstein added that to meet Carnival’s three-year targets, the company will further its brand efforts.

“Looking at the fourth quarter advertising spend and maybe taking it up for 2024, there’s two things. There’s getting the occupancy and getting it at a price that we want to get it at. And we do think that the advertising spend and the way we’ve been doing it has been effective not just on getting the volume, but getting it to a place where we can take the price up to where we want to get it to.

“So, I wouldn’t look at advertising as a one-and-done. We’ve somehow gotten back to something. We want to maximize. We want to optimize. And so, we’re going to keep doing – sorry, there’s some sirens in the background here. So, we’ll keep thinking that through and ratcheting up or ratcheting back depending on its effectiveness.”