In 2023, Marriott continued its content series with Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team driver George Russell, which would transform how we marketed our partnership. We knew that the content had to be authentically entertaining to appeal to the F1 fandom, so we came up with a plan that would efficiently reuse content, as we were limited to only 3 hours with the talent, and generate buzz amongst the community.

Our plan was to actively engage with the audience by replying to them in the comments on our Special Delivery videos on Instagram and with our own reaction videos.

Leveraging Instagram comments and the trend of reaction videos, we responded directly to the fans, with replies intentionally focused on witty "if you know, you know" references to the community and film.

To further capitalize on their time with George Russell, Marriott pulled a series of GIFs from the content series. The GIFs were snapshots of the most meme-able moments from the video series and were pulled with consideration to the moments that would resonate with F1 superfans, including inside jokes and clips that played on what fans love about George Russell. Marriott achieved 4M organic views on their GIF packs.

Additionally, while filming for a future episode, Marriott captured footage of George Russell reacting to fan comments on the first film. This reaction film was posted to the @marriottbonvoy Instagram account with 1.6M subscribers.

A TikTok creator and F1 fan, Jo (@f1diary on TikTok), created 3 reaction videos to our content series for her 5k followers. Mercedes PETRONAS then posted a film of George Russell reacting to Jo's video on the @mercedesamgf1 YouTube channel, which has 1.35M subscribers.

The “Special Delivery” series achieved incredible reach and engagement. For each episode, Marriott iterated on its successes and improved the relevance of the content and its media planning to reach new heights.

Episode 1 Key Results:

Awareness measured with a brand lift study conducted via Meta: Ad Recall saw a 10.1 point lift (7.1 point lift travel benchmark) and Brand Awareness saw a 6.3 point lift (2.7 point lift travel benchmark).

Episode 2 Key Results:

Awareness continued to improve from Episode 1 to Episode 2, measured with a brand lift study conducted via Meta: Brand Awareness saw a 6.6pp lift - 189% lift over travel norms and 5% improvement over Episode 1.

Episode 3 Key Results

Brand lift study results are pending, but this iteration of the content series saw more than 18M views.

Organic performance hit record highs for Marriott, with an engagement rate of 22% on TikTok.