Trivago Guy, RIP — You and Your Fellow Stars Have Been Retired From Travel TV Commercials

Online Travel This Week

They say cats have nine lives. Star Trek icon William Shatner, as the Priceline Negotiator, had several before fading away from the company’s commercials. And now the Trivago men and women around the world, the actors who saturated TV and pitched the company’s wares, have been dispatched to parts unknown, and retired from Trivago’s TV commercial lineup.

During Trivago’s earnings call Tuesday, chief financial officer Matthias Tillman said the hotel-search company shifted away from its memorable “Mr. Trivago” ads.

“So we started to prepare our new brand marketing campaign for summer and it is a continuation of our shift away from the Mr. Trivago concept,” Tillman said. “We tested a more engagement-driven approach last summer as we believe it was a better fit for the sentiment in the market. And we were very happy with the results, and we got some great learnings.”

In the U.S. in recent years before the pandemic, the Trivago Guy, actor and musician Tim Williams, was everywhere on broadcast TV, whether it was during Sunday National Football League games or on NBC Nightly News. The same was true for actors in various other geographies. Skift readers loved or hated Williams in the role — but certainly paid attention.

U.S. Trivago actor Tim Willams (left), Texas-raised but a German soap opera star, visited Skift’s offices in New York City twice over the years. Photo courtesy of Skift

In a Skift interview immediately following the earnings call Tuesday, Trivago CEO Axel Hefer said the big benefit of the Trivago Guy ads — there were female actors in assorted countries, too — was the high recognition of that personality. These advertisements were designed as explainers, instructing viewers how to search for hotels on Trivago, for instance.

But Hefer said there is less of a need to explain how the product works these days, and in going in a new direction the company wants to strike a better balance between establishing emotional connections with viewers and explaining the Trivago value proposition.

So the following is a compelling ad with no high-profile personality that ran as a TV commercial in several markets, including the U.S. and Germany, last summer, and it “tested well,” according to a Trivago spokeswoman.

Notice there is no central Trivago Guy or Ms. Trivago actor in the spot. Instead, a young kid explains that the best time of his life occurred because he met Lisa. Ditto for her because she met Ben. You see them sprinting through a field together almost like innocent children. The tag line is “Hotel? Vacation rental? And much more. Trivago.”

Incidentally, Hefer said Trivago “under-indexes on YouTube” — meaning Trivago doesn’t advertise on YouTube especially frequently — and favors Facebook and Roku video, and online connected TV because measuring viewer response is more limited on YouTube. Hefer said Trivago has always struggled with YouTube, and doesn’t particularly like it.

During the earnings call, Tillman said Trivago is ramping up advertising in the U.S., for example, in anticipation of a summer travel recovery there and in Europe because of the quickening pace of vaccinations.

The efficiency of advertising spend on TV often isn’t as great as performance marketing (such as on Google), he said, because some viewers aren’t traveling yet, adding that to reach a more targeted audience comes with additional expense.

Tillman acknowledged that there has been a consumer shift toward digital channels during the pandemic, but TV advertising can’t be replaced overnight, and will be important for the foreseeable future.

Trivago has traditionally split its advertising spend about 50-50 on performance versus brand marketing, and that isn’t necessarily changing, although advertising spend gets evaluated on a weekly basis, Tillman said.

“Right now there is no golden rule that we want to do 50-50,” Tillman said, adding that Trivago will evaluate its advertising opportunities opportunistically.

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