Whilst the COVID pandemic impacted almost every sector and category, the travel and hotel category business were perhaps one of the most acutely impacted by the immediate loss of leisure and business travellers, resulting in a +90% p.a. loss of revenue.

However even as the world began to tentatively re-open in early-mid 2021, it was only leisure travel being contemplated; but with much of the Marriott portfolio built around the business traveller, the challenge became to re-think how we could continue to be a much-loved and trusted travel provider, and one that inspires PERSONAL escape as much as it had previously enabled business ease.

Our objective became to find new ways to release that travel demand and fuel escape in a way that could inspire a (new or now latent) connection with Marriott Bonvoy, increase brand engagement and start to create future consideration of Marriott as a great leisure choice.

The pandemic created a universal desire to escape, but it also made us much more open to the world – visually and empathetically. That desire was keenly felt by those in the urban centers of America. A new tribe – and previously untapped leisure Marriott audience – was being created in our biggest cities: “Urban Captives” – were those most acutely feeling the struggles of travel restrictions.

Planning therefore focused on providing them with a new source of inspiration, one that could fulfil their need to escape the city they loved but to also save and support their home cities that they’d seen ravaged through via progressively empty 2020 real estate. Our approach therefore focused on enabling these would-be leisure travellers to engage with our comms across new OOH that brought touches of the familiar and human to their city, but within ‘media’ store environments they weren’t typically accustomed to.

Our socially-powered OOH campaign blended the familiar platforms of the pandemic – specifically Pinterest (their insights, searches and data) as a leading travel inspiration platform – with new live window units leveraging empty Manhattan storefronts.

Grounded in a new OOH opportunity powered by Lightbox, we created a marketplace “first” leveraging consistently refreshed (almost real-time – allowing for checks and storefront connectivity limitations) Pinterest trends to inspire urban captives to explore the boundaries of their world and think about travel once again. It was the first time Pinterest allowed a marketer to include their proprietary trend data (especially within high-traffic OOH), but it enabled Marriott to remain authentically ‘native’ to both our audience & platform

Custom storefront billboards across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Los Angeles were additionally supported by an interactive QR Pin Quiz travel influencer and influencer events across the cities helped to propel and extend the campaign’s reach and impact.

The results were beyond what we could have hoped for. Our interactive ‘storefront billboards’ were seen by over 6 million people, and our interactive Pinterest quiz was taken by over 50,000 passers-by. The snackable, inspirational content resonated with our target tribe, creating a newly qualified ‘streets’ audience for further leisure-focused retargeting and conquesting.

The overall campaign – working in symphony with smaller video vignettes & Fall-focused digital news-stands & bus shelters – contributed to the brand successfully increasing engagement with a previously untapped audience and exceeded revenue ROI goals by > 30%. Most critically, the campaign generated a 33% lift in Marriott consideration by non-members, a key focus as we expand our base beyond the traditional business traveller. PR delivered over 2m ‘travel’ impressions, and we critically further increased the perception of Marriott Bonvoy as being a great choice for Leisure Travel by >26%.