Hilton takes pride in its hospitality and service, but it’s their Team Members that are empowered to stretch their imaginations, and delight guests in tailored ways that speak to their passion; garnering life-long brand “love.” Based on the insight that it’s important guests not only know your product, but your people and values, we knew the best way to highlight this was by connecting viewers to our brand through human interest stories. It was our goal to create relationships with the world’s travelers so they get to know, love, prefer and choose Hilton for more of their travel occasions.
When a guest captured a viral video of our Team Member while staying at the Hilton Orlando Convention Center, we saw this as an opportunity to create a social-first, story-forward video introducing viewers to our Hilton Team Members. Alvaro Lopez is a Public Areas Attendant at the Hilton Orlando Convention Center known for bringing a smile to everyone’s day with his epic dance moves as he goes about his job. We aimed to increase brand affinity by creating an extravagant Surprise & Delight moment. From a social perspective, we knew the story had to be authentic, inspirational and customer-centric, while also grabbing viewers attention with storytelling that felt natural to the platforms.
Our goal was to get people to watch the video, all the way through, customize the story by platform and increase positive sentiment and engagements. We also hoped to learn if our audience had an appetite for this kind of storytelling.
In 2022, Hilton Social aimed to produce content that was customer centric and brand-led. Highlighting our Team Members in ways that bring Hilton stories to life in relevant, breakthrough content across our digital channels was important.
In May, a viral video was shared of Alvaro Lopez, one of our Hilton Team Members, showing his love for hospitality by dancing and entertaining guests as he went about his job. People started sharing the content and positively engaging, so we knew there was appetite to continue this storyline.
Our response had to be grand and social-first. Taking inspiration from Alvaro we decided to Surprise & Delight him with a flash mob of dancers. But we felt that wasn’t enough. We tapped into our network of properties and partnerships to also surprise him with an all expenses paid trip to our sister property in Las Vegas to see one of his favorite artists.
We partnered with Fresh Tape Media, our video production agency, to produce the whole story. We flew to Orlando where Alvaro thought he was being interviewed for a feature on one of our internal communication channels. What he didn’t know was that an 18 person dance mob had been strategically blended into the pool scenery, waiting to surprise him with some of his signature moves and favorite dances.
We were able to introduce Alvaro and his viral video to our viewers, share his wonderful background story and capture his genuine reaction to the dance mob. Everything from him jumping right in with the dancers to the overwhelming tears he shed when presented with a thank you for all that you do and the trip.
To help amplify the story and garner maximum attention and promotion, we distributed it across multiple internal and external channels. Alvaro’s story was shared via platform tailored videos across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube, along with internal communication channels, our Hilton Careers social and blog, and our property’s social handles. Also, through our partnership with Adam Grant and TEDX, Alvaro was a guest on Adam Grant's podcast, ReThinking with Adam Grant. By sharing on social, we wanted to generate reach and buzz through an ownable social moment that humanizes Hilton Hotels & Resorts and shows how Team Members can elevate their stay.
This was the first time we tackled a project like this for our team, with our new production agency, and with one of our properties. We had multiple meetings that integrated all stakeholders to ensure everyone knew their roles and responsibilities for the day of the shoot. Our biggest challenge came during the editing stage as we worked to craft the right social-first storyline. While the video content exceeded expectations, we wanted the storyline that pulled the viewer through the video to feel genuine, authentic. The end result exceeded expectations.
To date the video has 2.25M paid impressions, 1.6M video views, 0.64% ER, and 72% Video View Rate which exceeded benchmark. We also beat our CPM benchmark for the year.
The organic TikTok received 1.4M video views, 5.8K engagements and 44 comments.
Our leadership team shared to their expansive LinkedIn network and garnered: 24K impressions, 900 engagements.
We conducted an A/B test to learn if length of video impacted performance. Our long video was 2 minutes and 14 seconds, our short video was exactly 60 seconds. We learned our shorter length video exceeded performance and we continued to put paid behind the winning post. This test helped inform future content to tighten our storytelling as much as possible. We also found that keeping it to 60 seconds opened the door for to easily share on video length-restricted platforms like Reels and YouTube Shorts.
Comments:
Great story and awesome recognition! We could all use a little more Alvaro in our lives. Cheers!
People like Alvaro make travelers choose Hilton...the nice amenities and other brand standards are nice feature but the people are why we return.
Hospitality is how you make people FEEL and Alvaro makes people smile. Great work Hilton Orlando team and Chris Mueller, CMP!!!!!
Alvaro exudes Passion daily!
