Faced with brands competing for the summer market, Corona needed to cut through and bring ‘La Vida Más Fina’ (The Fine Life) to a new generation.
So our objective was to infuse life back into ‘La Vida Más Fina’, and get our audience to take PTO for travel.
Tripadvisor data shows that it’s harder than ever to find the time to wind down – Americans are 1/3rd as likely to go on vacation compared to the 1980s!
Tripadvisor research also shows that 49% are not using up their PTO, and 30% work on weekends/holidays.
In short, work has become more important than many people’s passions, correlating with burnout and lack of enthusiasm for leisure.
However, 80% of Tripadvisor surveyees say that travel is one of their biggest motivations to take PTO – allowing people to see new places and do things they love but don't have time for.
Our idea was to go against the grain and not just sell bottles of beer. Instead, we did something no-one else did – teamed up with Corona to sell Americans the PTO dream.
We convinced people to break from their hectic schedules and use all their PTO by saying ‘Summer is Calling’. Besides, ‘the fine life’ is too short not to take PTO.
Our collaboration provided the guidance and tools to get people into the right mindset – using travel as a motivational guide to take time off to enjoy passions.
We put together a program to make every PTO day count.
Strategy
Our strategy was to focus on hard-working, less travel-taking audience to embrace the ‘La Vida Más Fina’ philosophy.
To motivate our ‘burned out’ generation, we had to speak to their pain points and tap into their sources of motivation.
It started with a Tripadvisor-led research study to investigate why Americans have a hard time taking time off. We then used those findings to create the overall program content.
Two key elements came to the fore: 1) Everyone has different motivations, so people needed personalized advice on kicking burnout to the curb. 2) We needed to make life easy for people, giving them the best options for them personally and advice on how they do these things efficiently.
We then established a custom-branded destination on our unrivaled travel website, visited by millions every week. We therefore could connect all the dots and house everything our audience needed in one convenient place.
It was time to drive a PTO revolution.
Execution
It started with a quiz - allowing every person to get a personalized guide for kicking burnout to the curb.
Once completed, people received their personalized itinerary, telling them how they could enjoy ‘La Vida Más Fina’ all summer long.
These itineraries were interwoven with Corona’s key brand focus areas: Food, Music, Beaches and Baseball (tying into Corona’s official partnerships with Live Nation and Major League Baseball).
We even curated itineraries around the 2023 MLB All-Star weekend, taking the brand’s association with baseball to another level.
Additionally, we provided data-powered travel guidance.
With lying on a beach ranked in a Tripadvisor study as the most effective trip to help disconnect from work, we produced guides to beach destinations and beach travel.
Our data also told us that people planned on using their PTO for domestic trips - so we told them where to go and what to do.
Travel guides highlighted the hottest destinations, including Austin, Nashville, Seattle and Southern California.
And as Tripadvisor research showed that food and scenery were top motivating factors for travel, we created a run-down of top summer food trucks to sample.
We also put sustainability at the heart of our partnership.
Tripadvisor promoted and reinforced Corona’s advocacy around clean beaches with a sponsorship of the platform’s annual Traveler’s Choice Best of Beaches awards, a list of the highest ranking beach destinations as determined by its users.
And the two organizations teamed up in beach clean-ups throughout summer, even sending Tripadvisor’s travel influencers to take part and promote their participation.
The outcome meant that people put Corona top-of-mind as travelers browsed top-tier beach destinations, and associated the brand with responsible travel.
Corona’s new immersive Virtual Reality world, where people can visit a virtual clubhouse and sample the bar, golf course and gift shop, was promoted by Tripadvisor, creating another new hot online destination for people seeking a virtual break.
Harnessing Tripadvisor’s unparalleled first-party targeting and data meant our content reached the people we needed to talk to - with demographic, geographic, and interest-based targeting applied.
Summer came calling to our travel hungry and beer thirsty audience.
Generating a remarkable 16.5 million impressions, our custom content drove more than 16,000 visits to the custom hub on Tripadvisor in just over two months. Our branded articles used to promote the campaign delivered 24,000 unique views alone.
And our audience clearly loved what we did, with a 5% point increase in awareness for Corona, and a 7% point increase in favorability for Corona.
Branded Trips achieved an average dwell time of nearly 2 minutes (112 seconds) and almost 18,000 page views.
More than 23,000 people watched the videos on our influencers’ Instagram reels, and they played a pivotal role in promoting the Protect Our Beaches campaign, attending numerous beach clean-ups in Los Angeles and New York City throughout the summer.
Their efforts not only raised awareness but also inspired their followers to participate in their own beach clean ups.
Most importantly, we made ‘La Vida Más Fina’ a realistic proposition for a generation of hard working young Americans.
And we did it by pushing PTO to the limits.
