To get breakthrough creative work, brands must be excellent partners. This means providing crystal-clear briefs with budget parameters, onboarding agencies as extensions of the team, and delivering consolidated, actionable feedback. The quality of the output directly reflects the quality of the client's input.
Beyond driving memorability, mascots like the Hotels.com Bellboy are powerful assets for AI-driven marketing. Creative teams can use AI tools to easily scale the mascot's presence—placing them in new destinations, outfits, and scenarios—making content creation more efficient and dynamic.
The "All in the names" campaign playfully contrasts confusing names like "chicken fingers" with the brand's straightforward name. This reinforces their core promise of simplicity and being exactly what they sound like—the easiest place to book hotels, which proved to be a game-changing creative strategy.
To ensure a brand promise like "simplicity" permeates beyond ads, Expedia involves teams like product and supply in the initial consumer insight phase. This collaborative process leads to a shared "brand blueprint" that the entire organization rallies around, ensuring a consistent traveler experience.
As AI-powered search (LLMs) makes travel information ubiquitous, a brand's trustworthiness becomes its most critical asset. When booking an expensive holiday, travelers will default to brands they know and trust to handle issues if something goes wrong, making strong brand marketing more important than ever.
Instead of a complete redesign, Hotels.com brought back its nostalgic "Bubble H" logo after research confirmed its strong existing brand equity. This strategic move saved the cost and time of building recognition for a new logo, instead opting to modernize a beloved and recognizable asset.