Priceline is one of our best examples of how an agile approach to brand transformation can inspire a new product idea that dramatically affects the bottom line. Priceline was a market innovator in 1997 and with highly engaging TV commercials featuring celebrity spokesman William Shatner, “The Negotiator” convinced people that naming your own price was the future of travel. The company rode the rollercoaster of the dotcom boom and bust, ended up in a dark hole from 2000-2009, then rocketed out to match their 1999 IPO peak in 2013. The following year sales had flattened as new competitors continued to flood the market, Priceline needed to take quick action and innovate their marketing. Our first meeting with the senior marketing team should have been our last. We went right after their sacred cow and asked the following questions: Do people really want to negotiate their travel? Wouldn’t they rather just get the deal and not have to work for it? You can offer exclusive deals every day, why don’t you just give them the deal? Before anyone could answer we showed them how to take an existing daily deal feature buried deep within their website and connect that deal to moments people cared about each day. We showed how we would match the existing brand tone with Mr. Shatner and his partner Kaley Cuoco with new product messages at a more frequent and opportunistic cadence, learning what was most effective at increasing bookings. We named the new product Express Deals, increased engagement by 3X, lowered the cost per engagement to $0.06 with an average earned reach of 1.5M per post and increased bookings by 15% YOY. This gave Priceline the sales lift they needed to break out of their flatline and as an extra ego bonus a Bronze Effie for sustained success.
Denver played New England in the AFC championship for a shot at going to the Super Bowl in NYC. The moment Denver won, we tweeted to Bronco fans the price of a flight from Denver to NYC with a link back to purchase, increasing Express Deal booking travel by 7% in a 48-hour period.
John Travolta famously flubbed Idina Menzel’s name as he introduced her Frozen performance at the 2014 Oscars. We connected this moment to hotel and airfare deals to destinations that are hard to pronounce, increasing Express Deal bookings 2% in a 24 hour period
The U.S. tops Europe for wine consumption and we connect this moment to hotel and airfare deals available that day to California wine country, increasing Express Deal bookings 1% in a 24-hour period
This image was created in anticipation of the summer blockbuster Godzilla and posted during beach season. We connected this moment to hotel and airfare deals to popular beach destinations increasing Express Deal bookings 5% in a 72 hour period
In their heyday Priceline used to be a regular on Super Bowl Sunday. While they enjoyed the mass awareness, the price tag became too expensive for the return they were getting after the bust. Running a Super Bowl adjacent media campaign also has no guarantee on return, but the investment can be more palatable and who knows, if you do it right, you could see some healthy ROI. Our approach to generating awareness of the new Express Deals product was to re-create every meaningful Superbowl in game moment in sports highlight fashion. Since Priceline did not pay to sponsor any teams, players, or the league, we went with our strengths. Speed to create and rapid distribution on an active platform (Twitter). As an Easter egg nod to Priceline’s early dotcom beginnings, we chose to re-create each Super Bowl moment with Pets.com style sock puppets but the main reason we chose the puppets is to communicate how quick, cheap, and easy Express Deals are to get. With every advertiser releasing their commercials a week before, we were able to re-create the ads as well. In addition, we created the half-time show acts with our in-house talent singing in the style of the artist. To make it feel like William Shatner was watching the game along with you, we pre-recorded every possible play that could happen in football and then matched the audio to the actual moment. Our time from actual Super Bowl moment to sock puppet re-creation to Twitter distribution was eight minutes.
RESULTS:
19.5M Earned impressions (1.5M paid) / 19.5K Content engagements / Brands with prime Super Bowl TV spots saw 5-19X social mentions.
Priceline had 15X without a TV buy (fig 1) / 40% increase in SOV over direct competitors (fig 2)
This behind-the-scenes video will give you an idea of how much effort and planning are required to pull off a live content campaign for a single four-hour event.
With the successful landing of the first rover on Mars, the entire world went nuts when images of the red planet’s surface were beamed back to earth. Talk of manned missions escalated and Elon Musk got busy. Being in the travel business and having spokespeople connected with television science and space, we created a series of Kickstarter style fundraising videos to build the first luxury hotel on Mars. The videos led back to a mini site that featured actual Express Deals for travel and hotels available to purchase that day.
We continued to experiment with other forms of content to build awareness and trial of Express Deals. This included ways to place a daily deal in a relevant video and a contest for Korean Air where the audience would have to hit the pause button at the exact moment the plane flew over the Korean Air logo. (They would send in a screen shot to be entered in a free ticket drawing.) Additionally, we followed our successful sock puppet Super Bowl strategy and re-created Oscar nominated movies as Express Movies and distributed them on social channels the moment a movie was mentioned during the awards show. And finally, our illustration team created detailed infographics that were designed around significant events.
