Title	BOOKING.COM: EXPAND HORIZONS
Brand	BOOKING.COM
Product/Service	EMPLOYER BRANDING CAMPAIGN
Category	A04. Travel, Leisure, Retail, Restaurants & Fast Food Chains
Entrant	MEDIAMONKS Hilversum, THE NETHERLANDS
Idea Creation	BOOKING.COM Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
Idea Creation 2	MEDIAMONKS Hilversum, THE NETHERLANDS
PR	BOOKING.COM Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
PR 2	MEDIAMONKS Hilversum, THE NETHERLANDS
Production	MEDIAMONKS Hilversum, THE NETHERLANDS

Name	Company	Position
Emily Firth	Booking	Global Employer Brand Manager
Marilyn Yee	Booking	Regional Employer Brand Manager
Nicole Olwagen	Booking	Creative Producer
James Leadley	Booking	Copywriter
MediaMonks MediaMonks	MediaMonks	Creative production partner
ThirtyThree ThirtyThree	ThirtyThree	Strategic Partner

Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

To help Booking.com take its recruitment to the next level, we produced an employer branding campaign starring employees from Booking.com’s worldwide offices. Inspired by the notion of ‘going beyond’, the film showcases the company’s open, ambitious and fun culture and invites people to visit the Booking.com careers portal. As part of the campaign, we also produced a behind-the-scenes video and social content, turning each potential applicant’s “hmm, maybe” into a “hell yes!” After all, who better to provide an impression of what working at Booking.com is like, than the people who are living it day to day?

background

Booking.com needs to recruit skilled candidates, and on this front, they’re competing with Silicon Valley giants like Google for the best tech talent. They needed a campaign that would help them stand out and reached out to us to help bring it to life. The resulting Expand Horizons-campaign, aims to attract new talent by showcasing the people that are shaping the future of travel: the employees of Booking.com. Expand Horizons features over a hundred Booking.com employees – just a small portion of the 17,000 people responsible for evolving the brand from the inside out. The campaign also shows how Booking.com is expanding as a business and evolving its services to include everything from attractions to transportation.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

Booking.com reached out to us to launch their first-ever global employer brand campaign. The end result was a video shot across three continents as part of a campaign that provided a personal peek inside the tech company’s global community – with Booking.com’s very own employees starring in the campaign. After all, who better to convince potential new employees to join the company than the people who are already happy to be there? The campaign was an opportunity to position Booking.com as more than just a travel company and emphasize its credentials as a tech company, as well as the sleek, fun atmosphere that helps turn employees into evangelists for the brand.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

The target audience consists of skilled candidates, anywhere in the world, who are interested in working for a leading tech company. Our approach was to attract candidates by highlighting the vibrant work environment and atmosphere at Booking’s offices, and introducing them to their potential future coworkers.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

The entire production involved five months of prep and five full days of shooting across Booking.com’s offices in Amsterdam, Toronto and Shanghai. Booking.com relied on us to complete the cross-continental production. Expand Horizons is the second large-scale film collaboration between the two companies. Everything about how the campaign was developed involved the Booking.com internal community: from the way our strategy was developed to refining the concept and writing the script, through to our cast of talented employees who auditioned to take part. Because we shared a mutual vision for this project, the process was rewarding and seamless for everyone involved.

List the results (30% of vote)

The film earned nearly 13.000 organic views on YouTube, and 98% of reactions were positive (in terms of likes versus dislikes). The reach for the film was 40M potential candidates, and social engagement KPI’s were two to three times higher than average industry benchmarks. Brand perceptions improved measurably in some key hiring locations, and the film caused a significant uptick in job seekers applying to work at Booking.com. In internal research conducted before the campaign launched 80% of people who watched the film indicated it made it more likely for them to apply for one of our job opportunities.