The Hotels brand was stuck in its discounter image, and to stand out from the competition we needed to shift our image to one of a hotel expert that would matchmake travellers to the perfect hotel for them.

If there’s one thing an expert does know, it’s the ins and outs of everything that happens at a hotel. While it’s easy to tell a functional product story on TV, we knew there was a richer one to tell on social.

Our younger targeted audience were less interested in big celebrity endorsements, and more culturally curious, keen to understand and be close to the emerging end of culture.

The brief was to find a way to land our brand message of “hotel expert” in a fresh way through social media that would engage this culturally curious generation of travellers.

'Perfect 10' is a content format in which we asked the world's most interesting people, 10 conversation starters about hotels. Everything from “the first thing I do when I check in” and “my best hotel story” to “my hotel secret”.

We continued to use the same conversation starters with a range of culturally influential guests who were at the emerging, not established, end of culture, from Christina Ricci to Yvonne Orji.

From stories of impromptu hotel suite parties in Hollywood to tips to avoid the beach front rooms, the conversation starters elicited a truly inside, expert look at hotels.

The strategy was simple. To land our brand message in a way that felt believable and added value we needed to be 'in-the-know'. Of course, that meant asking interesting hotel questions, but it also guided who we picked to work with. We looked to emerging talent that lived on the periphery of celebrity culture. Which allowed Hotels.com to produce content which felt timely, interesting and reinforced that we had our hand on the cultural pulse.

Our conversation starters were designed to tease out confessional, playful answers revealing our guests’ travel tastes, as well as truths about their lives and personalities. The episodes catered to a shorter watch running around 3 minutes an episode.

For a topic that most would write off as being ‘newsworthy’, the series was picked up by over 150 different publications, securing 1.2B potential impressions everywhere from Variety and Architectural Digest to People Magazine, Travel Noire and CNN Underscored in the US and Hello Magazine and The Sun in the UK.'

On YouTube, where most audiences hover over the 'skip' button, 1 in 2 chose to view the episode and 1 in 3 watched the whole 3-minute episode from start to finish, with an average view time coming in at well over 2 minutes.