Marketing Objectives:
Clearly state your marketing goals.
What did your company strive to achieve using this piece or program?Best Western’s marketing goals for its TripAdvisor 360 Tours campaign sought to: ? Deepen customer engagement and increase brand awareness with exciting 360-degree content ? Maintain a strong presence during online travel planning by delivering highly relevant messaging to users to stay top of mind ? Leverage VR technology to drive purchase intent and bookings through bestwestern.com ? Position Best Western as a leader in the hospitality industry through first-to-market, exclusive and innovative advertising opportunities ? Showcase Best Western’s modern amenities, loyalty benefits and rich promotions, each designed to meet the needs of today’s modern travelers

Target Audience:
Who was/is the target audience?
Characterize the composition, size, and location of your target audience.Best Western’s TripAdvisor 360 Tours campaign leverages the platform’s extensive reach as one of the world’s largest travel sites, reaching more than 385 million unique monthly visitors and generating more than 350 million reviews. Through the partnership, Best Western targets content to the right person at the right time, delivering branded messaging to users at critical moments in the path to booking. Using a strategic mix of targeting and retargeting tactics, the campaign serves ads to users based on their content interests, habits, travel intent and more using Best Western’s own CRM data and TripAdvisor’s first-party data. The campaign retargets audiences who viewed specific Best Western properties or competitor properties on TripAdvisor. Using behavioral targeting, the campaign also serves to budget, business and leisure travelers, as well as affinity audiences such as AAA and CAA travelers.

Research, Planning, and Implementation:
What market research was conducted prior to planning the piece/campaign?Best Western found success in virtual reality long before the technology’s mass acceptance. In 2016, the VR industry generated $3.7B in global revenue and by 2020, the industry is expected to generate more than $20B. Research proves 360-degree video ads drive 7% higher purchase intent compared to traditional video ads. Best Western’s early adoption and investment in rich 360-degree content has established the brand as an industry innovator. Best Western’s TripAdvisor 360 Tours campaign engages users with a 360-degree tour of Best Western properties, offering an immersive experience for prospective guests. A digital display ad is served to targeted audiences, prompting them to click through to view Best Western’s 360-degree content. Based on the user’s interests, a 360-degree hotel tour is dynamically served, which is relevant to a destination the user showed interest in. The ads populate the hotel’s TripAdvisor rating to further entice users to book.

Message:
What is the key message intended for the piece/campaign?
What differentiates your piece/campaign in the marketplace?The campaign communicates that today’s Best Western offers options to meet the needs of today’s modern travelers. As the first-to-market hospitality partner, Best Western positioned itself as an industry leader in adopting engaging technology to improve the guest experience. The campaign was designed to engage users at key moments in research and travel planning. Best Western’s TripAdvisor 360 Tours campaign encouraged users to “Experience Today’s Best Western in 360-degrees” with its hotel tours. The ads dynamically displayed relevant information on specific Best Western branded hotels, pulling in city names, hotel names, TripAdvisor bubble ratings and a 360-degree property video. Each video gave users an immersive look at important amenities like rooms, lobbies, breakfast areas and more, pulling from Best Western’s library of thousands of 360-degree property videos, which were developed as part of another industry-first initiative in collaboration with Google.

Results:
How did you measure the effectiveness of your efforts and what direct and tangible results did you achieve? Please be as specific as possible and share the full impact of your efforts in CSR. Understandably, maintenance is another major part of CSR. If you have continued to actively and consistently work on your CSR process; please add those actions to your results description.

Results:
Which of your original goals did you achieve and how?
How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign? Entrants should provide quantifiable results of their tactics or campaigns.2019’s innovative campaign was the result of Best Western’s long-standing relationship with TripAdvisor, which opened a door to be the first travel brand to deliver 360-degree content through the platform in 2018. With a strategy developed in partnership with unparalleled understanding of the travel category, the campaign leverages dynamic technology to serve travelers a customized message with specific rates, 360 videos and standard banners that speak to priority audiences at their peak time of booking interest. TripAdvisor’s modern advertising models served as a perfect platform to position Best Western as the premium booking choice for today’s travelers, with preliminary results showcasing a valuable return on investment in reaching and engaging prospective guests. The campaign generated more than 56K engagements and 359k+ interactions totaling to over 80k+ minutes spent interacting with the 360 videos over the 5-month flight.

Research, Planning and Implementation
What research was conducted prior to planning the initiative? Describe the step by step efforts to plan and implement the initiative in a way that would allow others to be able to duplicate your efforts. Were their individuals or teams that offered leadership to ensure effectiveness?

Message and Communication
What were your key messages? How did you differentiate your messages? What was the purpose of the communications? How did you communicate your actions to the target audience? What other stakeholders or media did you approach for assistance?

Results and Impact
What results had the greatest impact on your target audience? What results were directly tied to the HSMAI Foundation Mission? Which of your original goals was achieved? Please comment on the process and the outcomes. What measures were used to determine success? How was the data collected? What is the status of the initiative now – will it continue? Was it effective? Will it be used continuously? Will you help others use the initiative to help the industry meet its needs for exceptional talent? How?

Message:
What is the key messages intended for the piece/ campaign?
What differentiates your piece/campaign in the marketplace?
What helped you breakthrough on mobile?

Results:
What original goals did you achieve and how?
How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign?
Entrants should provide quantifiable metrics tied to real business results (eg brand lift, leads, or bookings generated).

Project Analysis:
Please provide a brief background on the project and your efforts to preserve the destination’s natural, cultural and historic heritage.

Objectives and Goals:
What did organization set out to achieve in undertaking this project?

Creativity and Innovation:
What new and innovative ideas did you incorporate in either your method of outreach or in the implementation of the project that you think could inspire others committed to sustainability in the tourism and travel industry?

Communication:
How did you communicate your actions to the public, the media and other key stakeholders and what was the aim of the message?
How did you generate publicity in order to build awareness of, or support corporate values on your sustainability initiatives.

Results:
How did you measure the effectiveness of your efforts and what direct and tangible results did you achieve?

Leadership:
Please list the individual in a leadership role responsible for the project and how would you characterize their commitment to promoting preservation and sustainability best practices in the travel and tourism industry?

Entry TitleBest Western’s TripAdvisor 360 Tours Campaign

DivisionDigital Marketing

Sub-categoryDigital Campaign

CategoryNEW: Experiential

Classification