Marriott International’s Aloft Hotels is the quintessential hospitality brand for music lovers and music makers. The Live at Aloft Hotels: The Homecoming Tour takes Universal Music Group musicians back to their roots to perform exclusive live shows for fans at Aloft Hotels in their hometowns around the world, showcasing Aloft’s global footprint. To raise awareness for the tour, we designed an innovative social-first digital tour scrapbook and dynamic promotional content for the Aloft Hotels global social channels to engage fans and sustain the campaign throughout 7 international music events.
The tour scrapbook is rooted in the nostalgic feeling a homecoming brings, with an interactive digital spin. The visual treatment brings together still images from influential music photographers; short-form videos from the concerts; and tour merch to unite each post in the brand’s Instagram grid as if it were one analog scrapbook page. This concept came to life as a custom-designed Instagram takeover and ancillary social content, distributed across Facebook and Twitter on the brand channels and reshared by the music artists and partners.
The unique social media visual identity was designed based on a few core objectives:
-Generate awareness for Aloft Hotels and The Homecoming Tour campaign that brings exclusive live music to its hotels around the world
-Create unique social-first assets that would generate engagement within the Aloft Hotels and Universal Music Group artists’ social communities
-Strategically leverage influential music photographers to capture content at the events and maximize messaging reach in conjunction with a paid social campaign
Live At Aloft Hotels: The Homecoming Tour, powered by Universal Music Group, follows 7 musicians, including Troye Sivan, Dermot Kennedy, BANKS, as they journey home to the cities that shaped their careers, to perform exclusive shows in Aloft Hotels for their day-one fans. The tour engages both music makers and music lovers on a global and local scale by evoking the feelings of nostalgia that only a journey home can conjure. It also delivers on the Aloft Hotels brand promise to entertain guests with live performances in our hotels with cutting edge tech and innovation. We were inspired to develop thumb-stopping content that would instantly elicit that same sense of nostalgia while helping drive awareness, relevancy, and engagement for the Aloft Hotels brand.
A few key considerations in strategizing this campaign were:
Art Direction
We set out to design an innovative social-first experience for fans to follow along with Live at Aloft Hotels: The Homecoming Tour, collecting memories from the tour as we pass through each city. Inspired by trending multi-media social content, we created a veritable tour scrapbook that nods to the nostalgia of attending concerts and saving mementos and memorabilia from your favorite shows. The tour scrapbook was designed to takeover the brand’s Instagram grid, featuring live show photography, videos, and UGC collaged with images of hotel and tour ephemera, including wristbands, ticket stubs, candy, filmstrips, and branded coasters and guitar picks. Knowing the campaign would be sustained across the span of several months and cities, the scrapbook Instagram grid takeover proved to be a unique and ownable creative treatment that would evolve, stand out visually from the brand’s evergreen content and give substantial social real estate to a milestone activation.
Photography
To make the tour scrapbook a reality, we partnered with a network of photographers and videographers who excel at capturing live music performances. Aloft Hotels tapped 3 influential music and entertainment photographers, Ashley Osborn, Jeremy Cohen, and Jess Gleeson, who captured the energy and intimacy of the live performances throughout the tour. The photographers not only documented the shows with stunning press-worthy photo, video, and GIF content, but also shared their on-tour experience with their social audiences of more than 275,000 followers combined, giving the brand additional reach and exposure in the music industry.
Content Strategy and Multi-Channel Distribution
With paid media running throughout the tour, we designed the tour scrapbook to have a consistent look and feel across brand channels and would entice new visitors to follow along with eye-catching imagery. What started as an Instagram-specific concept evolved into a creative treatment that could be versioned and applied to the brand’s other organic social and digital platforms, as well as ancillary content for our music artists and partners to promote the tour, all designed with shareability in mind. The tour scrapbook treatment was applied to content for Instagram Feed and Stories, as well as Facebook and Twitter, resulting in an ownable golden thread creative treatment and a new visual identity for the brand’s social platforms.
As a result of a thoughtfully designed social-first visual identity and strategic collaboration with some of best live music photographers in the industry, Aloft Hotels succeeded with:
115+ unique pieces of content created
481,512 organic social media impressions
15,271 total organic social media engagements
500% increase in video views year over year
2.1B+ PR impressions
