Based on the thought that passions spark contagious enthusiasm we wanted to tell stories of people travelling for their passion, to inspire viewers to embark on a trip of their own. In order to unlock their contagious excitement we had each protagonist reach the pinnacle of their passion, for example tasting the very best ramen in the world.

To ensure the stories were hyper-relevant, we collaborated with Google Zoo to deploy a multi-source, data-based approach identifying emerging and seasonally relevant passions to build our ideas upon. This lead to the Ramen story being organically picked up by numerous media outlets.

To ensure our inspirational Passion driven stories resonated with our audience we utilised

VICE’s, Booking and Google search behavior data. With this close collaboration we set up our campaign up for success. We identified themes and topics based on seasonality, interests, trends and booking behavior. Based on this input we based our concept and started research for stories. We validated the stories against the data we mined and validated the influencer/characters as well.

We shot each story platform agnostically, meaning we created a central narrative from which we could extract several films. This enabled us to make different edits geared to the strength of the platform we published e.g. on Facebook we had vertical videos, on Youtube horizontal for example. We used the different videos to A/B test on a content level as well. We created hypotheses to optimise the content along the way. We tested if passion lead content worked better than destination lead content, or on social we tested of influencer involvement made an impact on the VTR for example. With every outcome we optimised the current content where possible and incorporated the learnings in the next episodes.

Each story had booking.com’s service integrated in a natural way, showing it’s value and purpose. We learned that, if done properly, branded moments in a video aren’t a nuisance to the viewer. The editorial merit and brand/product relevance made that our audience actually celebrated Booking.com for it.

When we saw the first 5 seconds of our Ramen film wasn’t captivating enough, we re-edited and uploaded it again and saw a significant uplift in VTR.

The impact of our efforts led to a massive, organic press pick-up from the world’s most credible media outlets (like Highsnobiety). The story achieved widespread positive engagement across all the platforms.

Incremental site visitation uplift 7% (set benchmark 5%) (Booking.com, 2017).

Hero video view through rate 29,3% on average, hub video view through rate 26,6% on average (set benchmark 22,7%) (Facebook/Youtube, 2017).

Completion rate of Frode’s story reached 93% (kid you not, Google checked 4 times) (Facebook/Youtube, 2017).

Total amount of video views 8.1MM+ (Facebook/Youtube, 2017).

People went out of their way to praise the content and tag their friends and even invite them on trips. But, more importantly, the campaign affected a change in consumer behavior; during the campaign periods the ‘passion’ referenced in the story was the most trending search keyword on BDC platforms. E.g. people were looking to book Ramen trips.