HomeAway Will Spend $100 Million to Show it Is Not Airbnb
Skift Take
Welcome to a lodging company, HomeAway, that is NOT targeting millennials but instead is going after "whole families." It has little to do with short-term rentals and it may turn out to be short-term thinking.
A day before it reveals its fourth quarter earnings, HomeAway announced it will launch an integrated marketing campaign next month that's geared to show it is not Airbnb, and it is not targeting millennials.
"As we've gone through that soul searching about what the company is I'd say the general conclusion we've come up with is that we decided it's more profitable for us to target being a better us than being a worse them," HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples tells Skift.
HomeAway spent around $60 million in advertising in 2014 and plans to shell out $100 million in 2015. The company didn't detail the exact cost of the new campaign, which will be part of its overall 2015 advertising spend.
"Which means certainly, there's lots of temptation when you see the market cap around an Airbnb to think about, 'Gee, should we jump into that space?' But the reality is we have a really good thing going in the space we're in," Sharples says.
The new campaign will include two 30-second TV spots revolving around Emma, a young girl, who is bummed out because she can't bring her dog, Biscuit, on vacation. [Stills from the unreleased ad are at the bottom of this post.]
With TV, print and social media, including using influencers, the advertising blitz will run in the U.S., the UK, France and Germany, and center on the them that H
