Online travel booking is fiercely competitive and the category is oversaturated. Consequently, consumers see little difference between brands. In 2022, travel demand in the U.S. had almost fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels, but the competition between online travel agents was as fierce as ever. Booking.com was struggling to cut through all the noise.

Our task was to help Booking.com stand out from the pack. And to do it on two of the largest advertising stages: the Super Bowl and the Oscars. What better way to show it than with a show tune called “Somewhere, Anywhere”, performed by the star of Bridesmaids and The Heat, Melissa McCarthy?

Inspired by all the options on Booking.com, our hero Melissa McCarthy gets swept away on a whirlwind musical tour of vacation rentals, hotels, and wigs galore. While most travel advertising is focused on aspirational locations, we romanced the booking experience itself. Filmed both on-location and at the CGI Volume Stage, and backed by a 33-piece orchestra, this piece showed the world that “Booking is half the fun.”

This campaign celebrates the return of leisure travel by featuring beloved star Melissa McCarthy booking her first post-pandemic trip. The main film is an over-the-top musical called “Somewhere, Anywhere.” In it, Melissa imagines all the places she could go and uses Booking.com to find accommodations that meet her exacting specifications.

The Big Game :30 and two-minute film that ran during the Oscars were two of the most visible parts of a massive, year-long campaign to grow Booking.com in the United States.

Booking.com’s competitors focus entirely either on low prices or aspirational destinations, leaving a big gap for us to take advantage of: Booking.com would be the one travel site that focuses on the joy in the experience of planning and booking the trip.

Academic research suggests that people actually enjoy the anticipation of a getaway as much as if not more than the vacation itself. And when we conducted our own research, we discovered that 73% of bookers actually enjoyed the experience of booking their last trip.

So what if we presented booking not as a source of stress, but rather as an enjoyable part of the journey? What if booking were, in fact, half the fun?

Built as a stylistic love-letter to musical cinema, the original track for this film was recorded by a 33-piece orchestra and sung by a chorus of Broadway talent. Everything you hear in the track is a real musician—no stock or shortcuts—and it was crafted in collaboration with award-winning Broadway composer Drew Gasparini. The track was recorded at the legendary Power Station Studio where the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and David Bowie have recorded.

The Somewhere, Anywhere ad, which aired during the second-most-watched Super Bowl game in history, and again during the Oscars, was an incredible success. After the ad aired during the Super Bowl, the brand saw a 400% increase in Booking.com-related searches, and it became the #1 most watched Super Bowl ad on YouTube with over 118 million views, and still counting. The campaign also generated a high volume of earned media coverage, with over 3,200 stories covering the work, and 94% of the coverage garnering positive sentiment.