Stop setting media briefings, KPI’s or even looking at audience data and profiling before you think about a narrative. Your brand story and narrative should lead any digital marketing campaign today.

The true potential of digital advertising and the ability to really cut through the noise can only be effectively achieved by blending a concept, story, narrative, creative assets, specifications of ad format and a particular audience that will relate to that piece. And that audience should be based on a specific set of behaviours, tastes, personal choices and not on demographics, postal codes or “personas”. Digital tools today allow so much more granularity with less wastage. For example, and even outside of digital, we still see a majority of brands planning against broadcast TV and creating an ad after or simultaneously. How can that be effective?

This is why we love Airbnb’s latest campaign leveraging YouTube ad sequencing to bring their product and service to life. The answer was starting with a creative and then choosing an ad format to perfectly tell that story.

To promote their Adventures product launch to match a new market appetite for more authentic and local travel experiences, especially with millennials, Airbnb created a set of 6 core adventures from their offering in video form that would portray different styles, tastes and uniqueness of their service in a compelling video narrative. To tap into people’s passions, they wanted to immerse the viewer into the adventure itself and decided that the best ad format would be YouTube’s Ad Sequencing. Each story would then be split into different stages leveraging a mix of short and long-form video ads. And since each of the 6 stories would relate to different groups, targeting was then decided to split these groups using custom-built audiences based on their tastes and behaviours.

This integrated approach from creative to execution saw a conversion rate 40X higher than the overall account average showing that people were interested in visiting the Airbnb Adventures website to learn more. And while Airbnb decided for YouTube, you can be creative and achieve similar results with other platforms such as Facebook & Instagram by sequencing your story with remarketing windows based on ad interaction.

Start with a key concept. Everything else should follow suit.

To Learn more about Starting with a Concept, get in contact today.