Is Airbnb’s Big Ad Blitz a Dud?

Online Travel This Week

During the first month of Airbnb’s new global marketing campaign, which includes tens of millions of dollars worth of TV commercials it is running in five markets, the effort didn’t significantly boost its global website traffic.

ISpot.tv, a television analytics firm, estimated that Airbnb has spent about $14 million so far on TV commercials for the campaign in the U.S. alone.

Does the lack of a spectacular boost from the advertising blitz, which began February 22 and includes digital advertising around the world, make it a bust?

Skift asked traffic analytics firm SimilarWeb to track Airbnb’s desktop and mobile traffic during the period of the active advertising campaign globally, and in the five markets where the TV ads are running, namely the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. See the traffic numbers in the following chart.

Source: SimilarWeb

While Airbnb’s website traffic globally rose 5.7 percent to around 5.5 million during the campaign’s first month, according to SimilarWeb’s numbers, the increase wasn’t significant in the context of Airbnb’s overall traffic increases in recent months, the advent of Covid vaccinations, the popularity of short-term rentals, and emerging travel demand, a SimilarWeb spokesperson said.

“We have yet to see significant traction because of the Made Possible By Hosts campaign, but global traffic is up 10 percent globally in March due to natural recovery and increased movement from vaccinated populations (comparing February 1-22 versus March 1-22),” said Alisha Kapur, SimilarWeb’s lead travel industry analyst.

Website traffic in the UK leaped from February 22, the start of the campaign, to February 23, but this was tied to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s February 23 announcement that international travel restrictions could be loosened starting April 12, Kapur said.

With France going into its third national lockdown, it’s clear that the trajectory of Airbnb’s website traffic is not merely contingent on an advertising blitz.

“The ads seek to show appreciation for current hosts while attracting new ones,” Kapur said. “This is an especially savvy move now, when vacation rental demand is beginning to outpace supply. The ads will run through the summer and should gently reinstill trust with newly vaccinated hosts and guests, further strengthening loyalty for Airbnb’s brand, the cornerstone of its entire business.”

Airbnb, however, indicated it is seeing some positive results from the campaign in certain markets.

“While there are many factors that bring people to the Airbnb platform, and this can be influenced by drivers such as seasonal travel patterns, we have seen an increase in traffic to the platform in markets where the campaign is running since its start,” an Airbnb spokeswoman said. “In many markets, more people are visiting a specific web page where they can learn how to be hosts. For example, the number of visitors to the host webpage in Orlando increased by over 40 percent since February 22 (when the campaign launched) to March 14, while the number of visitors to the host webpage in Seattle increased by over 30 percent over the same time period.”

Airbnb is a polarizing company; it has passionate fans and avid haters.

On Twitter, for example, some people saw the ads as morose or depressing. “Is the new Airbnb spots the most depressing ads of the year,” tweeted Kurt Kretten. “Felt like I was watching one of those ASPCA [American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) ads. Made by Hosts? Already depressed enough, that suddenly doesn’t inspire me to go rent somebody else’s house and stay inside.:

YouTube comments, on the half dozen or so TV spots that have been released to date, have been turned off.

Here’s one of the newest ads, or “films,” in the parlance of Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. Walk on the Wild Side: Made Possible by Hosts traces the joy of a young boy on his first big trip, through the French countryside, with a stay in a villa with a green door.

Erik Blachford, a venture partner in Technology Crossover Ventures, which invested in Airbnb, tweeted: “I have to say, I think it’s the best travel ad campaign in a long … Perfectly targeted with ’80’s covers, super smart us of photo story telling. I mean, this is great creative and you can see how it tests well across multiple segments.”

In a brief Skift interview via text messages Wednesday, Blachford said Airbnb uses “the covers of old songs over photos of young people. Man, I’ve got shoeboxes of those photos from when I was a kid. The campaign is about building out emotional attributes.”

Airbnb doesn’t need an immediate payoff from this creative, he argued. “This campaign is planting seeds,” Blachford said. “The harvest will come in the fall.”

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