2023 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Online travel booking is a competitive category in which consumers see little difference between the brands — and show almost no loyalty. Booking.com has to fight for every reservation. The competition includes not only big players like Expedia, Trivago, and Airbnb but also hundreds of smaller travel booking sites and the hotels and airlines themselves.

By late 2022, travel demand in the United States had almost entirely recovered to pre-pandemic levels, but the competition between online travel agents was as fierce as ever. As the cross-border team handling Booking.com’s advertising in the United States, their task was to help Booking.com pull ahead of the pack. And to do it on the world’s largest advertising stage: the Super Bowl. So, a Super Bowl spot. A homerun, right? Not quite.

To continue to build brand salience for Booking.com, the agency needed to be in front of audiences not just during the big game, but in the run-up to it and well after it had ended. If they were to stand out, they needed to be in multiple different digital, social, and PR environments, with bespoke comms for each – they needed a true 360 campaign.

Even with tens of millions of eyeballs, you can’t win the Super Bowl in 30 seconds.

A 360 campaign that would keep Booking.com top of mind well after the game had been called.

In online travel booking, top-of-mind awareness is a life-and-death struggle. In theory, a Super Bowl campaign, with its tens of millions of guaranteed eyeballs, is a great way to build that awareness. But it’s tough to break through all the noise of the big game. Even a big celebrity is no guarantee. So, they took a two-pronged approach.

A memorable and entertaining creative idea that would establish the platform “Booking is half the fun,” in a way that would get people talking. 2. A communications plan that focused as much on everything around the Super Bowl as the big game itself. The agency’s campaign celebrated the return of leisure travel by featuring beloved star Melissa McCarthy booking her first post-pandemic trip.

The main spot is an over-the-top musical called “Somewhere, Anywhere.” In it, Melissa imagines all the places she could go and uses Booking.com to find accommodations that meet her exact specifications. The big game :30 was only the most visible part of a massive, year-long campaign to help Booking.com win in the United States.

In the run-up to the Super Bowl, they deployed a teaser video on YouTube that built anticipation for the :30 commercial, along with a carefully choreographed public relations campaign. The agency also created a two-minute version of the :30 spot to build buzz even further. They crafted dozens of assets for multiple different online and social environments.

On YouTube, instead of simply running their TV spot, the agency took a different storytelling approach that dropped the viewers right into the action and kept their brand central. On Meta, they ran videos that leveraged short, bite-sized moments with Melissa, that were designed to work without sound. And on TikTok, an entertainment-first platform, they created content that made use of native features such as text-to-speech and trending editing techniques that kept their audiences engaged.

The “Somewhere, Anywhere” ad, which aired during the second-most-watched Super Bowl game in history, and again during the Oscars, was an incredible success. Even before the game, the Super Bowl spot tested above the 95th percentile for awareness and effectiveness.

After the ad aired during the Super Bowl, the brand saw a 400% increase in Booking.com-related searches, and it became the #1 most-watched Super Bowl ad on YouTube with over 118 million views, and still counting. The campaign also generated a high volume of earned media coverage, with over 3,200 stories covering the work, and 94% of the coverage garnering positive sentiment.

Credits

Agency: Zulu Alpha Kilo
Creative Chairman: Zak Mroueh
Chief Creative Officer: Tim Gordon
Executive Creative Director: Casey Rand
Creative Director/Art Director: Rachel Goss, Vic Bath
Creative Director/Copywriter: Ross Wolinsky, Dan Cummings
Associate Creative Director/Copywriter: Marco Buchar, Greg Kieltyka
Associate Creative Director/Art Director: Michael Romaniuk, Ivan Mallqui
Account Team: Christine McNab, Meghan Mullen, Caroline Engram, Erika Dafoe, Amanda Wong
Strategy Director: Heather Segal, Sean Bell, Cameron Fleming, Shanaugh Farrelly
Client: Booking.com
Clients: Glenn Fogel, Arjan Dijk, Natalie Wills, Ben Harrell, Diana Agudelo Hernandez, Ali Ronca
Ian Kennelly, Andrew Slough, Cam Beaumord, Nick Thiel, Giuliana Latte, Wei Lun Wang, Ina Balabanska, Johannes “Yordi” Tromp, Leslie Cafferty, Angela Cavis, Laura Kaye, Eséte Workneh, Beniam Gebeyehu
Production Company: Arts & Sciences
Managing Producer / Executive Producer: Marc Marrie
Managing Director / Executive Producer: Mal Ward
Head Of Production: Milena Milicevic
Director: Alex Prager
Director of Photography: Matthew Libatique
1st Ad: Michael Salven
Production Designer: Florencia Martin
Producer: Terri Shafirov
Production Supervisor: Andrea Tello
Editorial: Arcade Edit
Editor (Somewhere, Anywhere): Geoff Hounsell
Editor Teaser/Socials: Will Hasell
Assistant Editor: Dean Miyahira, Mitch Mitchell
Executive Producer: Crissy DeSimone
Head of Production: Megan Dahlman
Senior Producer: Alexa Berman
Sound Mix: Wave Studios
Partner/ECD/Sound Designer & Mixer: Aaron Reynolds
Sound Designer & Mixer: Isaac Matus
Executive Producer: Vicky Ferraro
Original Music: Barking Owl Sound
Composer: Drew Gasparini
Composer / Arranger: Jacob Plasse
Executive Producer: Ashley Benton
Creative Director: Kelly Bayett