CASE STUDY
HOMEAWAY
GOAL HomeAway needed to increase their awareness.
ASSIGNMENT We were tasked with creating a fully-integrated effort across multiple platforms. It had to be launched in a highly competitive environment during Super Bowl XLV, continue afterward, and reach pre-established goals for increased brand awareness and name recognition.
BACKGROUND HomeAway brands are the global leader in the vacation rental marketplace with over 540,000 homeowners listing their vacation homes for rent. Despite their dominance in market share, they operate in a category that is little understood, and has very low brand awareness. Complicating matters, when consumers go on vacation the automatic default is to choose a hotel. This is how it has been for decades; vacation rentals aren’t even part of the conversation. We needed to get consumers to break with the automatic default and put vacation rentals squarely into the consideration set. The good news is that the benefits of staying in a home are clear and evident. Once leisure travelers engage in considering a vacation rental, consideration is automatic: added space, privacy, connection to the community, and more.
THE CHALLENGES Hotels are the default choice, even when they are not the better choice. No one understands the category. No one knows the HomeAway brand. Homeowners who list with HomeAway are positive about the company, but they see them as just a listing service. We needed to move from a listing mentality to a community mentality. In short, the key was to get prospective travelers, current homeowners and prospective homeowners more engaged in the brand.
THE IDEA The previous year, HomeAway launched an effort during the Super Bowl that used celebrities from National Lampoon’s Vacation movie franchise. The results were considered very successful. Three months later HomeAway approached Vendor Inc. to develop a second effort to launch during the following Super Bowl. This time HomeAway wanted to avoid the costs of borrowed interest and celebrity talent. Great ideas are always more powerful than anything else, even when that anything else happens to be Clark Griswold. Our idea was simple. We wanted to put a name to a movement that people already embraced, but didn’t know it yet. While most of us love to travel, few of us want to be seen as, or treated like, a “tourist.” In fact, people react with great negativity to the notion of being called, or even considered, a “tourist.” Naturally, we invited people to go another way. We invited them to step away from the well-worn ruts of conventional travel and embrace being a “Detourist.”
THE CAMPAIGN HomeAway’s new work launched during the Super Bowl XLV. The goal was to communicate why hotels are bad, why HomeAway homes are good, and to gain attention for a small brand with a relatively small budget. However, we couldn’t just jump in and tell the story of HomeAway, we had to begin by explaining the category itself. We were then tasked with creating a sustained, integrated 360-degree campaign to continue post Super Bowl. Our efforts were timed to position HomeAway as a viable vacation option at the beginning of spring, the heart of the family vacation planning cycle. To engage people in the brand beyond the Super Bowl, Vendor Inc. worked with best-in-class partners that are at the forefront of digital technology on a global scale. The idea was to create a powerful customizable component to the campaign. The result was an experience that was not only the most innovative and customizable user-generated content initiative in the history of the Super Bowl, it was the most innovative and customizable initiative ever.
The customization piece we developed allowed consumers to insert their face, or the face of a friend or enemy, into the Super Bowl ad, then share that ad via email, Facebook and Twitter. Face uploads aren’t new territory, but the customization experience we designed for the homeowners was entirely groundbreaking. We created a way for each of HomeAway’s 540,000 customers to customize the Super Bowl ad to not only feature their home, but to also include an actual tour of their home. The customized tour could then be shared with potential renters or those who inquire about the property. In the end, the digital effort made it possible for a Super Bowl commercial that ran only once to mushroom into a sales tool for each of HomeAway’s homeowners worldwide. The customization experience was supported across paid digital media, social media, HomeAway. com and direct response efforts targeting both leisure travelers and homeowners. The campaign was also sustained by a massive digital and social marketing effort promoting the value proposition of HomeAway and the category as a whole.
THE RESULTS In a very short period of time the performance of the Detourism campaign has shattered nearly all client-established goals. Among the traveler target, unaided brand awareness is up 144% and aided brand awareness is up 44%. Among prospective customers (people who own a second home, but do not list with HomeAway), unaided brand awareness is up 277%. The digital advertising performance also crushed the metrics across the board and stands as the most effective marketing effort ever undertaken by HomeAway. For the first time ever, conversion from banner clicks to qualified inquiries reached double digit numbers. Last year’s effort resulted in a cost per qualified inquiry that was over $11. This year, the cost per inquiry was $1.96. The day of Super Bowl XLV, HomeAway’s commercial tied for second in driving traffic to its website. GoDaddy was #1 at 40%. HomeAway and the VW Star Trek ad tied for #2 at 27%. 252% YOY increase in net traveler inquiries. The total number of inquiries eclipsed the previous four-month campaign in the first six weeks, and is on track to exceed the established goal by over 50% by campaign’s completion. 100% YOY increase in inquiry conversion rate (number of site visitors who inquired about properties).
In the campaign’s first 72 hours it tripled the web views of the Super Bowl commercial versus the entire previous year (a celebrity driven spot starring Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo). Over 44,000 users developed customized Super Bowl spots using our digital experience. Most impressively, client models have determined that the increase in inquiry conversion delivered $75M in incremental revenue for HomeAway’s homeowners in the campaign’s first 30 days. This level of ROI is almost unheard of in any situation.
This is but a brief sampling of our work. Please contact us to see and learn more.
Tom Hollerbach tom.hollerbach@vendorinc.com 512.474.8363