2014 Gold Best Use of Social Media for Brand Building

Client Expedia

How did the campaign make a difference? Founded in 1995, Expedia became the net’s first big travel brand. But as competition intensified, a battle to offer the best deals kicked off. Travellers started to choose on the basis of price rather than brand values.

Expedia needed to re-engage travellers on a brand, emotional, high-value level.

In a highly commoditized market, it found an audience that still values travel and actively chooses the travel provider to book with. Expedia learned that these people travel in order to grow as a person and acted to position itself as the brand that helps you grow through travel.

With Travel Yourself Interesting, Expedia found a true and compelling way of talking about a specific way you can grow through travel.

This Travel Your Tweet Interesting stretched the campaign beyond traditional advertising and made a human connection with a new audience.

Strategy A major segmentation study showed that travellers roughly fall into two groups. The ‘Apathetic’ majority see travel as a nice-tohave, a cost to minimise; but the ‘Believers’ maintain their travel spend even in recession and cut other costs to keep travelling.

Against market trends, Expedia positioned travel not as a cost to be minimised but as an investment in personal growth.

‘Interestingness’ seemed the most compelling emotional travel effect for the Believer audience – with the target keen to captivate people with tales of their travels.

The creative line was born: ‘Travel Yourself Interesting’. The idea revolved around showing regular people becoming effortlessly interesting because of stories they had picked up on their travels.

Creativity Off the back of the ‘Travel Yourself Interesting’ TV campaign, Expedia ran an online activation campaign dubbed ‘Travel Your Tweet Interesting’.

The team figured that Twitter – home to some of the most inane status updates on the web – would be a suitable place to prove the power of travel to make even the most boring tweets interesting.

For two weeks, creative teams scoured Twitter to find the most mundane status updates and applying the power of travel to them.

In real-time, these tweets were cut out of meat and fed to lions, painted on cars, cast adrift as messages in bottles and sung out by naked cowboys.

This was videoed and sent straight back to the original tweeter – who inevitably shared it on.

Using the hashtag #TYI, people could nominate their own, or their friends’, tweets for a chance to win a free holiday and be ‘travelled interesting’ themselves.

Results Campaign success was measured through a communications model outlining the different attitudinal and behavioural effects Expedia wanted to see in its audience.

The campaign succeeed in attracting attention in a cluttered space, with over 5,000 hours of video watched and 40% more followers.

Attitudes towards Expedia were changed, with 99% positive sentiment about the camapign.

Most importantly, downloads of Expedia’s app increased 25.4% and more people spent more money with Expedia, more often – and directly through proprietary retail channels.

The erosion of Expedia’s margins was stopped and the campaign delivered an impressive ROI.