We created Meet Halfway; a digital tool that calculates the halfway point between friends living in different places all over the world and encourages them to meet up in real life. The site detects the user’s location, and upon entering in their friend’s name and city, the algorithm reveals their halfway point. From there, you can add up to two more friends and watch the halfway point automatically recalculate. The site works for any city all over the world; and if the halfway point is in the middle of nowhere, never fear. The site adjusts to find the nearest civilization. Friends could share their results on Facebook, and click through to Airbnb for instant property search results in that area. And of course, when they checked out with PayPal, they enjoyed $50 off their stay.

Implementation required calculating accurate halfway points for cities that span across the ocean. Several iterations of algorithms were used to find the midpoint, and then a work back to nearest coastline was needed. The tool then selected a city with a minimum population of at least 20,000 people. Our algorithm was also smart enough to handle multiple friends in different parts of the world. Finally, visitors were dropped directly to the best possible search result within the Airbnb page. While the algorithm worked, the site played through video footage of locations around the world, making the experience seamless to booking.

The share functionality was executed through a cluster of 10 servers to run ffmpeg which concentrated video clips and text. The render times were down to 3 seconds and could process thousands per minute, allowing all visitors a unique share populated with their friend’s names and their mid-point location.

By the end of the promotion, 35,825 halfway points were found. Those adventurous destinations led to 64,239 nights booked on Airbnb and 18,539 new PayPal user sign-ups. The site was shared to Facebook over 2,000 times. In total, the campaign received over 232 million impressions from a vast media buy that included video pre-roll, web banners as well as influencers who traveled to their halfway destinations and wrote content about their experiences.