To make an entertaining, brand-integrated home improvement/travel series in real-time with live interaction from engaged fans that drives sales and brand affinity for the brand partners: Vivint Smart Home and Wayfair.
Home Love Network is passionate about telling stories through premium, episodic digital content, and Traveling Home (The Series) is a prime example of Home Love's commitment to authentic, entertaining and informative branded content that fans WANT to watch week after week. (**Also, it's a really great series, you should totally watch it!)
Over the course of 8 weeks, The Bucket List Family (an adorable family of "Traveling Journalists") traveled to different countries around the globe gathering inspiration for Andy and Candis Meredith to renovate and design their Hawaiian dream-home-fixer-upper. Every country represented a different room, ie: Brazil for the Kitchen, Morocco for the Master Bedroom etc. and each week viewers watched a full before/after transformation episode of every room of the house, along with the travel adventures of the Bucket List Family.
To increase engagement and excitement, fans were asked to participate in this real-time adventure by picking the activity the Bucket List Family would participate in every week. The winning activity, whether it be riding camels in Morocco or going for a horse drawn carriage ride through the markets, would be featured on that week's episode. The Home Love team faced extreme challenges turning around each episode in real time, but the interaction and engagement from fans of the show was well worth any hurdles they had to face.
The two brands were heavily featured throughout each episode, with authentic integrations such as "why this smart switch is so cool" to "I have picked this couch from Wayfair because….." etc. Integrations were told in an authentic way so that the audience could truly connect with the brands on a "friend-to-friend" level, meaning fans actually WANTED to know how they could get a smart home for themselves, or how to achieve the same look using the same furniture from Wayfair.
Other methods of engagement and strategy included:
- Instagram and instagram stories for voting on adventures and sharing before and after photos and behind the scenes interactive footage
- A weekly blog that listed all sources for every piece of Wayfair furniture used in the home along with links to those products so customers could easily purchase (many items sold out because of this strategy)
- A "wrap party" live in-person event showcasing the brands and talent (Bucket List Family and Andy & Candis Meredith, former shorty finalists in the influencer category of house and home) that was attended by thousands of people and aired the next day for many thousands more to participate in
- A room makeover giveaway following the show using both Vivint and Wayfair products to one lucky fan as well as 10 days of giveaways where each day an identical item from the home was given away to a fan.
- Elle Decor and Forbes both featured the series and home as an exciting new type of home improvement content
The campaign not only drove over $1.8M in trackable sales for brand partners, but also had a 9:50 average watch time, 11.4M Youtube impressions, 2.3M organic views, and an impressive 11% engagement rate and over 185,000 engagements.
Fan across the world felt connected to not only The Bucket List Family and Home Love Network, but to our brand partners as well, creating long lasting brand affinity and brand recognition.
