Several large brands got publicity for riding the bench at this year’s Super Bowl. But at least one small company—and its agency—thought it a worthwhile risk to spend big bucks not only to buy ad time during the big game but to produce a large-scale commercial that employed highly familiar characters reprising their big-screen movie roles.
Austin TX-based HomeAway.com, a Web clearinghouse for vacation-property rentals, says the costly campaign paid off in game time buzz. But the real key to earning a return on its investment, the company says, is a follow-through strategy that gives consumers plenty of reason to come to the Web site and stay.
The commercial was built around the “National Lampoon Vacation” movies of the ‘80s and features Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo once again as the Griswolds of Chicago. Produced with agency of record Publicis in the West, “Hotel Hell Vacation” is a pair of original seven-minute videos that puts the couple through the rigors of commercial hotels and motels before showing them the ease and comfort of renting a vacation home through HomeAway.com.
The 30-second spot for HomeAway, aired during the Super Bowl’s third quarter, teased those Web videos as “a short film about hotel rooms” and directed viewers to the campaign microsite. And according to Homeaway.com brand marketing director Matt Cohen, the company saw the boost in web hits right away, with visits during that quarter hitting 460,000 per minute compared to an average of 275,000 per minute during the rest of the game.
“The campaign was always conceived as being to drive people online to view additional content that was exclusive to HomeAway.com,” Cohen says. “In addition to appearing on the microsite, the mini-movie appears on other sites such as YouTube, Hulu.com and a few other places. All told, since the Super bowl we’ve had about a million online views of the Griswold content.’
Interestingly, Cohen points out, about a third of those views came from embedded clips, showing that viewers were picking up the content and pushing it out via their own blogs and profiles. And 45% of the visitors to the Vacation microsite in the days after the Super bowl also clicked through to the main homeAway.com site and conducted a search for vacation properties. “For us, that was a true measure of effectiveness,” he says.
“We’re the largest Internet travel company that no one’s ever heard of,” Cohen says, adding that the company—which is still receiving venture-capital backing as a start-up —only started advertising in a small way last year. “Our goal for the [Super Bowl] campaign was certainly awareness, so having our brand shared like that has been a great achievement.”
In fact, agency LBI, tracking social media conversations the day after the game, determined that HomeAway.com increased its mentions in social media from an average of 3 blog mentions a day to almost 30. The only Super Bowl advertiser posting a bigger increase in social mentions was Dove for Men—a new product launched by Unilever during the game.
The Super Bowl ad campaign suited HomeAway’s sales season, too, Cohen says. “It falls at a great time in terms of people planning vacations, as well as being a great way to reach 100 million people in a very impactful way.”
The company won’t reveal what it spent to license the “Vacation” characters from Warner Brothers or produce the 15-minute mini-movie, but the cost of 30 seconds of commercial time during the game is assumed to be in the $2.5 million to $2.8 million range.
On the HomeAway.com microsite, users can also take part in a contest, launched on Super Sunday, to win a dream vacation rental from HomeAway.com by submitting their own essay, photo or video story of a “Hotel Hell” vacation experience in one of four categories: “Outrageous Bills”, “Wish I had a Kitchen”, “Cramped Quarters” and “Other Hotel Woes”. Players can submit their content until March 2 and then encourage their friends to come to the site and vote for their entry until March 9.
A panel of expert judges, including Chase and D’Angelo, will then take a look at the submissions and name a grand prize winner in each of the four categories. The winners will each receive a $10,000 rental of a vacation home in the HomeAway system.
Visitors to the site can also play an interactive “Griswold Getaway” game in which they’re challenged to load luggage into the “Wagon Queen Family Truckster” station wagon—an icon of the 1983 original movie—while avoiding flying objects that can knock items off the roof. The game, shareable through e-mail and on Facebook, plays out through five levels, including a visit to Cousin Eddie and his family, before winding up at a luxurious vacation rental.
Prior to the Super Bowl HomeAway.com also set up a Facebook profile and Twitter account for Clark Griswold, the character portrayed by Chase in the movies. The Facebook page now has more than 100,000 fans, while @ckgriswold had about 600 twitter followers.
And months before the “Hotel Hell Vacation’ campaign launched—in fact, in September 2009—HomeAway.com CEO Brian Sharples contacted a Wheaton IL man who was building an exact replica of the Truckster station wagon and offered to buy the car once assembled from spare parts.
The Truckster clone was not only used in filming the “Hotel Hell” mini-movie but will feature in a live-event promotion that will take it to popular vacation designations in the U.S. to promote HomeAway’s services.
“This was always intending to be the kickoff for a larger campaign,” Cohen says. “We did a lot of research and analysis of how other people had leveraged the Super bowl effectively. It used to be a one-and-done effort, but now it’s all about the PR budget, the online social build and the chatter you can develop after the game. We saw a lot of other small companies repeat at the Super Bowl year after year—GoDaddy, Cash4Gold, Cars.com—and thought we could leverage that traffic effectively too.”
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