Summary.
Working directly with Expedia’s International marketing team and collaborating with Ogilvy and Mather, Delete created a rich social campaign to build on the above-the-line campaign concept ‘Travel Yourself Interesting’. Our resulting Expedia Travel Profile Application allows users to create their own visually rich, info-graphic travel profile to share with their social world.
The campaign successfully ran in the UK and seven other European countries including Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Italy and France during summer months in 2014 and has subsequently been instated as an ongoing facebook engagement tool for Expedia.
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Brief.
To create a major social campaign platform for 2014 using facebook which celebrates the brand concept ‘Travel Yourself Interesting’, drives brand awareness and engagement with fans.
- It must have an x-factor cut through - with head turning quality.
- Create mass reach for the TYI message and ensure viral mechanics are at the heart of all ideas.
- Mobile needs to be prime consideration for any strategy and execution.
- It will need to work in multiple territories - EMEA - with localised adaptations.
The Strategy.
Social media is all about presenting a more interesting version of yourself to the world. The Expedia ‘Travel Yourself Interesting’ proposition fits this whole notion well... playing on how people present themselves to the world as more interesting is where our solution starts.
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Travel is a common experience many of us already have - whether holidaying or working.
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Our travel experiences are often already captured and shared socially.
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Our app’s goal is to allow the creation and presentation of this data in a more compelling and unique way. Making an ‘object’ of desire around user’s travel life.
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Social amplification is at it’s heart - using facebook's inherent community ethos, sharing is rewarded and encouraged.
User Experience.
We looked to move users through a reasonably complex app experience as simply as possible covering a number key steps.
- The Invitation to act.
- Acceptance of permissions.
- Enabling the data scrape.
- Review and customisation of your profile.
- Publish and Enter.
- Share and promote.
Ultimately our goal was to enable users to create a profile very quickly with a few simple clicks - while allowing those with more dedication and time to come back again to perfect their travel profile.
The Solution.
Our solution was the creation of a Facebook Campaign Application which allows users to create their own visually rich, infographic travel profile - via both browser based and mobile app Facebook versions.
Using a number of social APIs our application cleverly scans the user’s existing Facebook profile to detect travel-related information as well allowing them to add their own unique travel data via the edit tool. The App captures facts such as ‘number of countries visited, ‘highest place been’, ‘most interesting transport taken’, ‘total miles travelled’ and ‘famous drinks in cities you have drunk in’. The output is a personalised reflection of their travel life with an accompanying ‘TYI points’ score which they can use to challenge friends and family.
“Our key insight for the Expedia campaign was that social media is all about presenting a more interesting version of yourself to the world. We have built on this by creating a campaign tool, which allows users to profile themselves as travellers and broadcast this to their friends. The campaign is one of those unique instances where a proposition like ‘travel yourself interesting’ aligns with Facebook’s core functionality and the end creative solution so perfectly.”
– Damon Mangos,
Executive Creative Director, Delete
We styled the campaign on the classic iconography of travel documents from the 50’s and 60’s and data based information graphics to create fun and stylish profile format. Each travel data component needed to work on it’s own as a unique design element - but come together as a whole to create something more than the sum of it’s parts : a visually inspiring snapshot of our travel lives.
Technology.
We used our own Facebook Competition white label as the base structure for the campaign app - enabling all user entry mechanics and gallery.
The actual profile creation component was generated via the Facebook Graph API to scrape travel data from users profiles including where, when and with who the user had traveled. Data was further enhanced using the power of the Google Maps API to enable us to extract location and elevation to build the complete profile.
Finally, we made use of the Expedia Website API to look up hotel information such as name, pictures and star rating.
Results.
The Campaign ran concurrently in 8 European Territories for up to 8 weeks.
-James Davies. Senior Manager Social Media for Expedia EMEA.
