Dedicated to cutting through the clutter online, Marriott International's real-time marketing command center, M Live, created an experience never before tested and thought to be logistically impossible: the world's first Drone Dash livestreamed from inside a hotel. Remote-controlled, camera-equipped drones raced through a newly renovated hotel interior and wrapped around its stunning oceanfront exterior to drive hotel and destination envy.
M Live partnered with professional drone racers to fly multiple unmanned aerial vehicles inside a fully functional hotel.
With six highly trained UAV pilots, M Live enabled their machines to take flight, requiring skills, precision, and intense planning.
The team carefully mapped the course, laying hundreds of meters of cable, identifying multiple obstacles and deploying half a dozen drones across 12 camera positions and spanning 24 stories.
M Live partnered with our Americas continent team, W brand social team and the W Fort Lauderdale property team to showcase the newly renovated hotel along the drone race course through a Facebook Live video stream hosted on the W brand channels.
The Facebook Livestream showcased the newly renovated W Fort Lauderdale property and drove these four objectives:
The team created trackable room package codes to feature throughout the livestream to generate customer awareness, consideration and conversion. The codes were linked back to the hotel's website, amplifying the viewer's experience by exposing them to even deeper elements of the property such as guest room imagery, restaurant and bar detail, and local area information.
M Live partnered with What's Trending, a 24/7 news hub curating viral and sharable content, on a live talk-show during the drone event. With micro-influencer Shira Lazar as host, this further amplified the livestream beyond Marriott channels to What's Trending's 650K followers on Twitter and 500K follower on Facebook.
The drone dash drove 6.9 million PR impressions, and reached 524,000 users on Facebook and 118,000 livestream video views.
The W brand team, Americas continent team, and W Fort Lauderdale hotel have compelling evergreen images and short-form video content to repurpose on their respective channels.
The success of this pioneer project is being cascaded to the U.S. field marketing organization and across brands as an innovative method of driving support for new hotel openings and renovations.
