Will Airbnb’s Lackluster Ad Campaign Backfire as a Travel Recovery Picks Up Later This Year?

Online Travel This Week

Could Airbnb’s until-now underwhelming global advertising campaign, including television spots in five markets, come back to haunt the company later this year?

That might be especially true if for some reason rivals like Booking.com and Expedia, which would lean more heavily on paid marketing through Google, come to outpace Airbnb’s growth during a more robust travel recovery later in 2021.

What’s Wrong With Airbnb’s Ads?

Airbnb’s series of TV commercials, called Made possible by Hosts, are purely an image campaign with no coherent or targeted message. They are too long, at more than a minute each in some airings, and there’s no concise call to action.

Or any call to action.

For example, consider the spot, Forever Young: Made possible by Hosts, with the theme song sung by Firewoodisland. It features heartfelt scenes of guests embracing, kayaking, and otherwise enjoying host “Cynthia’s” The River Lodge.

During the spot a message appears, “Remember that weekend?,” and viewers get reminded that these soul-quenching experiences are “Made possible by Hosts.” The advertisements feel like host appreciation day.

But are the advertisements geared toward branding Airbnb as a place for guests to create indelible experiences, or are they an homage to hosts?

In Airbnb’s comments about the campaign, including when the commercials debuted in a virtual presentation to hosts, it’s clear the ads are geared toward spurring new hosts to sign up. But the campaign lacks a transactional message, such as hosting is great, sign up to help pay for your kid’s college, or to help meet the monthly mortgage.

The TV part of the campaign ends up being targeted toward everyone — guests and hosts — and therefore no one. It’s as if Airbnb executives have fallen in love with these artful “films,” and have neglected the science of creating a desired response.

Crystallization of 2018 Skirmish

In some ways, the advertising campaign is the end result of the 2018 battle within Airbnb that that saw the departures of Chief Financial Officer Laurence Tosi, and later Amazon alums Greg Greeley, the president Airbnb’s Homes unit and former leader of Amazon Prime, and Vinayak Hegde, who headed performance marketing.

In its very broad outlines, the losers in the skirmish advocated Airbnb becoming more like a traditional online travel agency, while using its brand advantage, and a hefty search engine marketing budget on Google, to go after Booking.com.

CEO Brian Chesky’s views prevailed, and he’s now intent on digging deeper to grow Airbnb’s ranks of hosts while steering clear of becoming another Expedia, or over-reliance on Google. Airbnb may still be investing in its hotel business, but it is clearly not a major priority, and launching a flights’ business is seemingly off the table for now.

The major global advertising campaign, Airbnb’s first in a handful of years, is part of Chesky’s strategy to leverage the Airbnb brand, to get back to the company’s “roots,” and to avoid enriching Google to the extent possible.

TV analytics firm iSpot.tv estimates that Airbnb spent $18.7 million just on U.S. TV ads in the nearly two months the spots have been running. So the global spending on TV and digital, including all the production costs in making the commercials, would not be inconsequential in a campaign that is expected to run for another few months around the world.

In 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, Airbnb spent $1.62 billion on sales and marketing, and that was 33.7 percent of revenue. The company is on record as pledging that sales and marketing in 2021 would not approach 2019 levels in absolute dollars or percentage of revenue — so that makes the strategic nature of the current global digital and television campaign all that more crucial.

It’s All About Execution

I would argue that Airbnb’s goal of reducing its reliance on Google marketing, and taking advantage of its brand recognition could be a winning strategy.

But it won’t work if a key component of the strategy — the global advertising campaign to spur host signups — misses by a wide mark.

That being said, all of these things are subject to change. Airbnb can certainly switch gears and heat up its search engine marketing later this year if it sees it is losing ground to competitors, or is not meeting its goals.

Like everything in online travel, whether it is trying out a new homepage design or two, or running a TV campaign, it’s all a learning process for Airbnb. Test and learn, and live to fight another day.

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