Thierry Henry in Rome
Playing on travellers' strong passions when choosing a holiday destination
Challenge
With millions of people making travel plans for Summer, holiday booking is a crowded marketplace and difficult to get cut-through - we needed to do something that would not only get Booking.com to stand out, but translate into real sales.We’d already developed a creative platform for the summer - ‘Booking Loves’ - which aims to inspire people, whoever they are and whatever their passion, to find their perfect accommodation. But how do you bring that to life during a summer when everyone’s minds will be on the Euros?
Solution
Our solution was to work with one of the world’s most passionate footballers, Thierry Henry, and draw out the strong passions travellers have when they are looking to choose a destination and accommodation.
Activity
We created a content film in which Henry speaks candidly about his career, travelling as a world-class soccer player, and what makes Rome special for him. This film was then promoted across Booking.com's social channels, as well as being shared on Henry’s own accounts.Within the YouTube version of the film, Booking.com uses YouTube cards that link to associated accommodation and inspiring trip ideas. When clicked these take the viewers directly to the Booking.com site where they can find out more information and or book.The campaign was extended with teaser films, product demos with Henry, Flipagrams, and even a short video showing how to re-create the pizza Henry is seen making in the hero film.Testing and learning is incredibly important to Booking.com and we delivered an approach that would allow us to A/B test social posts across channels, optimising as we went.
Result
Working with Henry and creating football related content during the Euros gave us a relevance and stand out leading to above average at driving view through rates, viewer retention and engagement.In particular, on YouTube we saw an average viewer retention of 99% for the product film, and significant brand uplift.The test and learn approach worked in practice, with certain posts achieving a 10 times higher engagement rate.On Facebook Flipagram, the Hero and Tasty films were among our best performing this year at driving ‘likes’, and the overall view through rate exceeded our benchmark by 17%.
The content on Twitter exceeded our benchmark at driving retweets by 28%.
And most importantly, the creative was able to drive more traffic to the site and deliver an uplift in conversion