PayPal wanted to increase both awareness and usage of their payment option on Airbnb. To do so, we proposed a partnership with Airbnb that went far beyond just the traditional promo code. Sure, getting $50 off your Airbnb stay when you checkout with PayPal is a great deal and all, but we wanted to do something that would make a social splash and change the behavior of both PayPal and Airbnb customers.
Our strategy was to target the overlapping mindset of both brand users. We sought out the adventurous, technology-forward, social individuals who wish they could spend more time with their friends. We noticed a key truth about many of our target audience: they have since moved away from home, and have lots of friends living in different cities. Thus, they've replaced in-person interactions with texting, video-chatting and the like. So we created Meet Halfway: a digital tool that calculates the halfway point between friends living in different places all over the world, and encourages them to meet up in real life.
The Meet Halfway site detects the user's location, and upon entering in their friend's name and city, the algorithm reveals their halfway point. From there, you can add up to two more friends and watch the halfway point automatically recalculate. The site works for any city all over the world; and if the halfway point is in the middle of nowhere, never fear. The site adjusts to find the nearest civilization.
Friends could share their results on Facebook, and click through to Airbnb for instant property search results in that area. And of course, when they checked out with PayPal, they enjoyed $50 off their stay.
By the end of the promotion, 35,825 halfway points were found. Those adventurous destinations led to 64,239 nights booked on Airbnb and 18,539 new PayPal user sign-ups. The site was shared to Facebook over 2,000 times. In total, the campaign received over 232 million impressions from a vast media buy that included video pre-roll, web banners as well as influencers who traveled to their halfway destinations and wrote content about their experiences.
