The Luxury Collection is a brand that provides Marriott International with the opportunity to grow with unique and iconic assets. Given each hotel is distinctive in design and experience, we needed a strategy that would strengthen brand awareness globally and differentiate The Luxury Collection from other brands within the Marriott portfolio and among hospitality brands as a whole.
We looked to solve these challenges through this ‘Hotels that Define the Destination’ brand campaign, specifically by:
Building upon The Destination Authority brand mission for The Luxury Collection, in July 2022, we unveiled the brand’s first digital-led paid media campaign “Hotels that Define the Destination.”
The 90-second “Brand Essence” hero film, along with digital and social-optimized cutdowns, focus on showcasing aspirational video content from The Luxury Collection hotels and destinations across the globe. The film’s voice-over inspires introspection from the viewer to identify what motivates them and creates a desire to explore and connect with communities around the world on a deeper level. The messaging paired with stunning visual footage is designed to create an emotionally charged desire to expand one’s perspective through travel and cultural exploration with The Luxury Collection.
Through this campaign and the experiences showcased in this film, we increased awareness of the breadth of travel opportunities with The Luxury Collection and invited our audience to consider the benefits of transformational travel. By sharing aspirational footage from our hotels and the destinations they call home, we informed viewers of the range of unique hotels around the world available with The Luxury Collection and sparked interest for the transformative experiences available at each one.
We implemented a social & digital brand ad distribution channel mix media strategy to shine the spotlight on brand video assets and halo properties by targeting our Explorers & Collectors. Equipped with an understanding of our audience and their media preferences, we built a recommendation that ensures we’re able to deliver assets only to the most relevant audience for the brand in a very efficient manner to build frequency at scale. We leveraged Facebook and Instagram's proven capabilities to generate video views and landing page visits to drive site traffic and awareness. We also leveraged YouTube’s unique TrueView format to allow us to optimize toward maximum reach while generating high video completion at the most efficient rates. The campaign is also featured on TheLuxuryCollection.com where our social media posts and digital communications drove viewers to experience the film.
Additionally, to adapt the campaign for a worldwide audience, the campaign was amplified to target EMEA source markets, including UK, UAE and Germany, resulting in impressive impressions (over 10M) over a short period of time.
The campaign delivered over 85MM impressions and nearly 5MM social engagements and was successful at increasing brand awareness (+3.3%), surpassing travel and overall industry benchmarks according to digital and social media brand studies. High levels of engagement with the campaign is a testament to the effectiveness of the brand’s ads and ability to tailor creative to each respective media channel and the user preferences associated with each.
The campaign also continues to exceed Google's travel benchmark in both Ad Recall and Awareness lift within our YouTube campaign, resulting in a +3.2pt lift in campaign awareness — 1.1pt higher than travel benchmarks. Additionally, we hit a VCR nearly 10% better than the Google benchmark.
