Situation: For more than two decades W Hotels has been known for cultivating and promoting emerging artists and musicians in cities around the world. Now they want to broaden their focus to find new and more sophisticated ways of supporting the arts.

Brief: Shift the perception of the hotel brand and elevate their activations to attract a new luxury consumer. The target consumer is one who uses travel to expand their world through new cultures, people and places. This is someone for whom luxury is personally defined; one who views luxury travel as fundamental to one’s happiness.

Objectives: Give W Hotels unprecedented access to the Vogue editorial team to develop a global artist residency program that establishes the hotel brand as an incubator for inspiration and places them within the context of culture through thought-provoking, relevant and influential storytelling.

Through A New Lens is a first-of-its-kind artist residency program that allows emerging artists to embody the spirit of three global cities: Budapest, New Orleans, and Osaka. W Hotels hosted

the two-week residency at its properties on three continents and awarded $90,000 in grants to

the featured photographers. Through this partnership with Vogue, we tapped PhotoVogue’s community of unsigned photographers giving them extraordinary exposure to the global creative industry. We sought to give a new generation of artists the ability to fully and authentically immerse themselves as proof of our joint investment in the artist community. Photographers Oumayma Ben Tanfous, Kennedi Carter, and Stella Asia Consonni captured the cultural zeitgeist of each place to create a body of work that seamlessly marries editorial and brand storytelling. This groundbreaking series provides a timely point of view in vastly different places while exploring themes like connection, perspective, and inspiration.

A continued focus on the arts was critical to this program’s success, but we wanted to look beyond music, a genre so closely associated with W Hotels. We focused instead on W’s unwavering support of artists and its long-held brand pillars: design, taste, stance, motion and, of course, sound. This was our foundation. Millennials are the core audience for this campaign and because nearly 40 percent of them identify as “digital nomads,” we wanted to play with the idea of living and working in cities around the world. A two-week artists residency and artist grant allowed our artists (photographers, specifically), to make genuine connections on the ground, immersing themselves in local communities. Our viewers experience the artist's journey as if they are there themselves. At every turn, we watch as our photographers have the freedom to grow, be curious and transform as artists.

Implementation: We developed an internal core project management team spanning multiple markets (Italy & US offices) and roles in order to spearhead the execution of the program. This core team was responsible throughout each stage of the process and consisted of editorial, creative, and production team members.

Timeline:

Casting & Scouting (soliciting entries and identifying photographers): 6 weeks

Pre Production (artist residency prep work + video pre-production): 6 Weeks

Production (global content shoots): 2 Weeks (rolling shoot dates)

Post Production (photo and video editing, article finalization): 5 Weeks

Placement: We distributed 50 pieces of custom content via digital article and photo galleries, long form and short form web execution across O&O platforms and social media in multiple languages across various international markets.

Scale of work:

3x Photographer Residencies in 3x Countries (Hungary, United States, Japan)

15x custom photos per residency

1x hero article detailing residency

Featuring

Reach: Video Views: 11,508,351 Total Impressions: 74,488,390 Organic Impressions: 50M+

Engagement: 20% ER Rate and 51% VCR Rate

Impact: 76% of consumers are likely to stay at W hotel after engaging with content. 76% visited W website after engaging with content, 66% Booked at W Hotels after seeing the content

Quality of experience and interaction: 85% of consumers loved the content

Change in behavior:, 70% of consumers think of W differently after engaging with content, 65% of consumers would share the content with friends/family

Brand perception: 7+ point increase in aided awareness, Content drove lifts in perceptions of W: 91% W is Modern, 89% W is Global, 89% W is a Place I want to Stay, 84% W is Inclusive

Achievement against objectives: W’s goal was to shift perception and drive engagement,action through the content and this campaign successfully achieved these goals as measured through a 3rd party research study.