How an exec team of one resurrected Ansett
Marketing entrepreneur Con Frantzeskos has explained how he came to capture the Ansett brand as the core of his new travel startup in an address to the Mumbrella Travel Marketing Summit.
Frantzeskos’ Ansett Travel is a membership-based travel reseller that offers hotels, flights and activities at what it describes as “near wholesale prices”.
There are at least two aspects of the startup that are distinctive: one, that it bears the name of the famous and defunct Australian airline that collapsed in 2002, and two, that it is being built and run by a single person with the help of several AI models.
Con Frantzeskos address the Mumbrella Travel Marketing Summit
That single person, Con Frantzeskos, is both a passionate advocate for the powers of AI and a realist who admits the brave new world he is pushing into is far from perfect. He appears to be filled with restless energy.
”Do [I] feel like an AI business like this is putting many of the people in this room out of a job? No, I actually think it’s quite the opposite. I think what it’s doing is expanding the market because it will mean that we are able to sell services and actually bring services to life that might never have been brought to life. If we believe that we are only going to be selling flights, accommodation, and car rentals into the future, then yeah, we’ll be out of a job. But if we believe that we can actually be personalized services where we bring incredible levels of intimacy and quality, then we are limited only by our ideas and our dreams around what’s possible.”
“I’ve got a tremendously large backlog of ideas of how I want this industry to evolve. And AI is enabling me to actually bring those to life.”
Frantzeskos explained that he had been watching the Ansett trademark closely for years, after working with IP Australia on their technical website implementation with the agency he founded, Penso. (Penso was acquired by GrowthOps in 2021. The group collapsed earlier this year).
”By registering Ansett, what it did was it actually allowed me to acquire customers because the power and value of one of the most loved brands in Australia is still extraordinarily strong.”
The coup he had pulled off – buying and restarting an iconic travel brand without getting sued by Ansett’s liquidators – was such that Frantzeskos received a wave of earn-media attention. After his initial post on LinkedIn, the Ansett story was covered in almost every mainstream Australian news site and on morning television.
The Ansett.Travel site
”The media went nuts. I had Channel Seven news crews outside my house. I mean, it was absolutely amazing. Someone at Nine told me that across all Nine platforms – radio, print, television, online – it was the number one story for two weeks.”
The story was enhanced by the AI angle: Frantzeskos is more or less doing it by himself – he says he has some human customer-service and admin help – but in his mind he has an executive team composed of the world’s top AI models.
ChatGPT, for example, he sees as his co-founder. Anthropic’s Claude – renowned for its coding skills – is his Chief Technology Officer. He consults with the models and refers their outputs to each other in a cross-checking process. He also uses other specific third-party AI tools – for example, to write personalised jingles for a member’s travel itinerary.
Overall, however, he doesn’t work in a vacuum but is guided by how the users are reacting.
“ I think the biggest mistake I can make is to sit there and have meetings with myself and wonder about what’s gonna work in market versus not work in market.”
“I’ll actually just test, iterate, put it in market, see whether people respond to it, and then adjust accordingly.”
In terms of marketing, Frantzeskos says he is achieving very low acquisition costs through a creative loop that links the news of the day to the tagline “You need an Ansett holiday”.
“What happens is at 10am and at 9pm, I have a couple of bots going out there and scouring the news. Finding all the things … where there’s high profile or people that have lost something or people that look, let’s be honest [like they could] do with a bit of a holiday, a bit of an escape.”
He then creates banner ads relating the news to the tagline (see example in the image below).
“This has allowed me to actually scale and get some real topicality and newsjacking in terms of the way in which I’m able to get excess share of voice and some real salience. So not only is it a famous brand, but a famous brand that is also highly searched, highly topical.”
Frantzeskos personally is comfortable with technology and technically minded. But he encourages all marketers to embrace AI.
“ Have a crack. The beauty of AI is, everyone’s kind of starting line at the moment.
“So if you’re not familiar with it, get on it … these platforms are dirt cheap, and the best way to describe it is it’s the smartest 22-year-old you’ve ever hired in your life. Go out and hire your own crew of 22-year-olds and you’re paying ’em US$20 a month.
“And just ask them about what you want to do. Tell ’em about your life. Tell ’em about what you want to achieve in your job or your career. And then it will give you some interesting guardrails. It’ll give you some crazy stuff that’s way off, and it’ll be wrong sometimes a lot of the time, but it’s a start.”
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