HOTELS 2017 Social Hotel Awards
Best integrated digital campaign: brand
Holiday Inn (tie, Outrigger Hotels & Resorts)
Holiday Inn received a Best of the Best nod for its Summer of Smiles campaign in HOTELS 2017 Social Hotel Awards.
It doesn’t hurt to capitalize off of successes completely outside the sphere of your industry. For Holiday Inn, that meant tapping Gaten Matarazzo (from Netflix’s “Stranger Things”) as the Summer of Smiles Kid Ambassador to drive engagement among families and kids, and to create social driven content, including a Facebook Live segment that had over 49K likes and 49 shares. Much of the social was driven by fun, onsite events like the brand’s first ever on-property Chocolate Milk Happy Hour (how did that take so long?), a virtual bedtime story program for family members traveling on business, character breakfasts, and a summertime lending library.
The plan: The campaign, which ran from April through August, was oriented around on property events developed specifically for families, which then created content opportunities for Holiday Inn’s existing social platforms.
The practice: By leveraging Facebook’s granular targeting and in-depth reserve buying system, Holiday Inn was able to reach nearly 20 million people in their target audience every six weeks at a frequency level of approximately 1.5 times weekly. A mix of ad formats helped drive positive reach and frequency results, as Facebook’s algorithm knows that specific types of ads resonate with certain people. The campaign also used illustrated and animated actual business and leisure guest service reviews for distribution on Facebook as a way to encourage and amplify guest reviews.
The payoff: The 2017 Smiles Ahead campaign generated over 60 million more consumer connections compared to 2016. In social, the brand reached 33 million travelers, which is nearly a 38% increase year over year, and exceeded goals for reach, impressions and CPM. To date, there was 5.39% engagement rate and 33.53% video completion rate on paid media posts. The campaign’s digital display has received more than 62 million impressions and a US$1.70 return on ad spend.
The runner up: Rotana Hotel Management Corporation