Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?
In 2022, JW Marriott began a partnership with landscape designer Lily Kwong to hone the concept of the JW Garden — green spaces at JW Marriott Hotels where guests can relax, take time apart, and rediscover the world around them. By creating gardens with Lily, the brand drove awareness around holistic well-being, one of its core pillars and an important avenue for building excitement for luxury travel consumers.
In 2023, this partnership extended from North America to Asia, with a new JW Garden created with Lily debuting at JW Marriott Hotel Singapore South Beach. JW Marriott Hotel Singapore South Beach offered a new and unique setting for a tentpole JW Garden — a secluded, tropical oasis built into a modern hotel amid an expansive metropolis, featuring flower-covered trellises and a signature ingredient of pandan for use in the hotel’s bar and spa programs.
To fully present the new garden in Singapore, the campaign comprised two pieces — a look back to the roots of the partnership and the first three gardens created across the US last year, and a new video series offering a deep dive into the JW Garden in Singapore, along with new social-first still imagery.
To share the JW Garden in Singapore, the brand created a five-video series with Lily acting as a narrator and guide, presented through evocative, documentary style footage shot at Lily’s home in Los Angeles as well as the new JW Garden. These videos covered five topics to give a full view of the JW Garden — a new overview of the partnership, its inspiration, garden design, guest experience, and culinary perspective — with placements across Instagram, IG Stories, Facebook, Twitter, and Threads.
Overall, the goals of the campaign were:
- Refresh and grow awareness of the JW Garden.
- Extend awareness of the JW Marriott brand pillar of well-being.
- Craft a narrative video series.
- Capture the attention of our audience by offering a deep look at the JW Garden experience and its inspirations.
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. (for example, click through rates or ad equivalency)
For a campaign focused on one specific brand initiative at one hotel, the JW Garden Singapore campaign has exceeded expectations, outperforming other similar campaigns across the Marriott International luxury portfolio. This clearly showed that we achieved our goal of refreshing and growing awareness of this brand pillar.
The campaign produced a strong number of thruplays, indicating a high level of engagement and interest with JW Garden content — up to 25% higher than similar campaigns after being normalized for spend. This demonstrates the power of using narrative video to capture audience attention and support this ongoing brand initiative.
These thruplays allowed the video series to achieve an average View-Through Rate (VTR) of 5.51%, surpassing the VTR metric of similar Marriott Luxury campaigns focused on F&B and service by up to 60%.
Return on Investment: How much revenue has the piece or campaign generated and how does this compare to your goal? What was the return on investment?
This is a top-of-funnel, brand-building campaign, and therefore not exclusively tied it directly to revenue when measuring success. While specific budget and revenue figures cannot be shared, this campaign did surpass expectations.
As JW Marriott continues to emphasize and expand its position in the well-being segment of the luxury travel space, marketing spend that brings awareness to well-being as a JW Marriott brand pillar and its associated offerings carries high value.
Following in the steps of the other JW Garden campaigns that have come before, this campaign generated significant return on investment in both raw brand exposure and reinforcement of a major brand pillar with our core audience.
Entry Title
Lily Kwong x JW Garden Singapore
Division
Digital - Social Media Campaign