Title	BOOKING.COM: EXPAND HORIZONS
Brand	BOOKING.COM
Product/Service	EMPLOYER BRANDING CAMPAIGN
Category	B05. Internal Communications & Employee Engagement
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
Marilyn Yee	Booking	Regional Employer Brand Manager
Nicole Olwagen	Booking	Creative Producer
MediaMonks MediaMonks	MediaMonks	Creative production partner
Emily Firth	Booking	Global Employer Brand Manager
James Leadley	Booking	Copywriter
ThirtyThree ThirtyThree	ThirtyThree	Strategic Partner

Why is this work relevant for PR?

Most companies still post jobs on LinkedIn or through recruiters and job intermediaries. But to get the most amazing talent, we feel like you need to take it one step further. So we developed a campaign that vividly showcases the in-house company culture at Booking.com, using the passion and personality of current employees to give potential new employees an authentic look inside the company, as well as to “sell” the benefits of working at Booking.com

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, produced by us, 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 PR strategy (30% of vote)

Working from the insight that an authentic message trumps any slick marketing speak, as well as having identified Booking.com’s own employees as the best ambassadors for the brand, we then set to figure out a way to best get the message out there. The production involved five months of preparation time as well as five full days of shooting in the Booking.com offices in Amsterdam, Toronto and Shanghai. Expand Horizons is the second large-scale film collaboration between the two companies.

Describe the PR execution (20% of vote)

In order to PR this project, we wrote and sent out a comprehensive press release detailing the strategy behind and realisation of the video and the campaign. Besides this there as a full-on social media campaign on both ours and Booking.com’s end promoting the video and the assorted campaign materials. Using our press contacts as well as expertise in the field of social media marketing, combined with the positive, uplifting message of the campaign itself, this was the kind of campaign that almost sold itself.

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.