Marine and cruise
Cruise lines, ferry operators and marine leisure brands, planned and made by one independent team. Television, out-of-home and digital, in the UK and the US.
Why marine is its own brief
Marine and cruise brands are not simply travel brands with ships. The consideration window is longer, the audience sits in specific places, and the product being sold is an experience that has to be shown rather than described.
That combination changes what a media plan should look like, and it changes what the creative has to do before the plan can work at all.
Four differences
01
A cruise is researched for months and booked once. That rewards media that keeps working between the first thought and the deposit, rather than a burst that has faded by the time anyone is ready to buy.
02
Nobody books a cabin. They book a coastline, a season, a level of service. That is a creative problem before it is a media one, which is why planning and making in the same building matters more here than in most categories.
03
Ports, catchments, feeder markets and the cities people fly from. Marine audiences sit in specific places, which is exactly what out-of-home is for, and exactly why a national buy alone tends to be wasteful.
04
Wave season, refit windows, itinerary launches and school holidays all move the plan. A calendar that is right for retail is wrong here, and a campaign that lands a fortnight late has missed the year.
Selected marine work
Five campaigns across television, rail and out-of-home, in the UK and the United States. Every one of them is written up on this site.
Digital out-of-home · May 2025
The Norwegian coastal line launched its first ever United States campaign with a digital out-of-home execution in Times Square. Havila runs hybrid-powered ships along the Norwegian coast, so the brief was to introduce a sustainability-led operator to a market that had never seen it.
Read the campaignNational television · December 2024
A national TV campaign built around the idea that the product is more than just a cruise, launched into Coronation Street. Imagine build their holidays in-house, so the creative had to carry experience rather than price.
Read the campaignNational television · September 2023
A national TV campaign for ultra-luxury cruise specialists sailing worldwide with the finest cruise lines. A different audience and a different register to the mainstream cruise market, in the same medium.
Read the campaignOut-of-home · March 2023
Three months of fully wrapped London taxis and branded tip seats, taking a ferry operator into a city that is not its own coastline. Red Funnel joined ma in the January and the campaign was live by the March.
Read the campaignDigital out-of-home · October 2025
A two-week digital out-of-home campaign across the London Underground and key rail stations, closing out October. Rail is where dwell time does the work, which suits a product that is researched for months rather than bought on impulse.
Read the campaignma has also planned and bought for Jetline Cruise, as brand and media end to end, including the Cruise Ahoy! customer magazine and its accompanying brochures.
What we do
National TV planning, buying and production. Delivered for Imagine Cruising and SixStarCruises.
Roadside, transit, taxis, rail and digital screens, planned around ports, catchments and feeder cities.
One brief across several markets through one team, as run for other ma clients in London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles.
Brand, campaign, film and content, made in the same building as the media plan.
Programmatic, paid social and audio, planned against the long consideration window.
Rights sourcing, negotiation and activation across sport, TV, streaming and culture.
Out-of-home for marine brands
Out-of-home is where marine audiences are easiest to reach precisely, because the audience is geographic by nature. ma plans and buys the full range of it, and Havila's Times Square launch and Red Funnel's London taxi wraps are two ends of the same discipline.
Start a conversation
Tell us the itinerary, the market and the window, and we will come back with what we would actually do.