Accor/ Serena Williams—Concept, creative and execution for a brand awareness campaign
Bringing a brand awareness campaign to life by generating emotional connection between an icon and an audience.
Project overview
SERVICES
ENGAGED
Communications
- Internal
Content
- Animation
- Copywriting
Creative/ strategy
- Art direction
- Campaigns
- Concept
- Strategy
Design
- Advertising
Digital
- Display
Management
- Implementation
PROJECT
MODULES
Concept development
Campaign design
and production
Output and
deployment
Internal launch
and awareness
campaign
OUTPUT AND
DELIVERABLES
-
Out-of-Home (OOH)Large format traditional billboards, large format animated digital displays and street furniture.
-
Print AdvertisingAustralian Financial Review, The Sun Herald, The Telegraph plus various trade and sporting journals.
-
Animated HTML5 BannersMRec, leaderboard, half page and mobile leaderboard for Google display.
-
Internal Launch AssetsA3 posters and email invitation.
-
Web BannersFor owned channels including social (Facebook/ Instagram) and accor.com
The client
Accor is one of the most prominent hoteliers in the world, and a global leader in what they call augmented hospitality. This, we’re told, means striving to understand their customers in all they do. The outcome is to provide travel and lifestyle across three categories: Live, work and play.
Whether organising elite events or creating meaningful experiences, their vision doesn’t just stretch to planning for the future, instead they want to create it.
For more than ten years, we’ve worked alongside countless executives across a multi-region family from the Pacific, into and throughout Asia, to their home in Paris, France. During this time, we’ve learnt them, and we’ve learnt their business, to better understand how we might support them.
40
brands
5.4k
hotels
110
countries
290k
employees
Pictured: Four-page cover wrap (Australian Financial Review)
Background
Accor’s Asia Pacific regional headquarters (Singapore) engaged us to deliver strong creative for a campaign to increase public awareness of Accor as a brand.
Asia Pacific’s Chief Sales, Marketing and Distribution Officer detailed during our briefing that, although most of Accor’s product brands (Sofitel, Mercure, Novotel, to name a few) were well-known, the Accor brand itself, as both creator and caretaker of the product, lacked any sensible public resonance.
He explained that an aggressive global acquisition strategy was in play and that the company’s Parisian headquarters had handed down directive to prioritise the master brand and double public awareness.
Fortunately, around the world, and most definitely in Australia, nothing gets eyeballs on a brand better than sport, especially if a brand has taken up the ambition of becoming a principal sponsor, making January’s annual Australian Open tennis tournament a gift horse to Accor.
With most of the country still on Christmas leave, school holidays in full swing, and the scorching Aussie summer beaming down, even those not fussed by sport will likely catch a match or two. Unavoidable live broadcasts stream into living rooms and inflate audience numbers ripe for the picking.
And to place the proverbial cherry on the cake, previous Australian Open champion Serena Williams had just confirmed she would sign as Accor’s Australian Ambassador for the coming Australian Open season.
Challenges
Seeing the media spend as predominantly digital wasn’t unexpected for a company doing business through connected channels, with large format outdoor digital displays receiving a hefty chunk of the budget too.
Digital OOH brings a sparkling new world of multiple and varied messaging capabilities, immediate live updates, and absolute ease in campaign design and delivery. We were considering a more dynamic creative until we discovered the final portion of the budget, albeit small, had been earmarked for traditional OOH.
Printed billboards don’t have mutli-messaging capabilities; you can’t update creative throughout a campaign, and they have rat-shit production schedules that requires approved creative weeks in advance. This shaped our ideation sessions immediately—the creative must work in unison across all mediums so short, sharp and shiny would be what made this one a winner.
Joyce Drive, Sydney Airport
Solution
Our first thought, which fit well with the challenge to deliver simple messaging, was to adopt a tried and tested marketing staple; the ‘three-word-tagline’.
Our world is saturated in threes. Three Musketeers, Three Little Pigs and Three Blind Mice, for example. Our brain is programmed toward the number three, particularly in how we recognise and create patterns. So to an audience, three is comfortable and memorable, which made it perfect for this creative, considering the dense and diverse audience demographic.
Given the campaign’s event-specific nature, we saw an opportunity to guard and even guarantee the campaign objectives by connecting through emotion, similar to how we connect with friends, but between Accor’s new Ambassador, Serena Williams, and the audience.
We mapped out the creative for it to be functional, serving a purpose where Serena would be introduced to the audience in a meaningful, believable way. The outcome would create trust between the audience and the ambassador to forge the necessary emotional connection.
We explored different avenues but found Serena’s greatest and most easily relatable connection was in her actual self, as a person. Harnessing her strengths and connecting them to the public in meaningful ways gave us three simple words.
These words simply state the facts and all that they imply;
Introducing our new ambassador, Serena Williams. A worldwide CHAMPION of sport, and ICON of fashion and philanthropy, and a GUEST at Accor hotels.
We acknowledged her greatness and many wondrous achievements, then normalised her as simply a guest of Accor, to reconnect her with the public, many of whom had also been, are, or will be a guest of Accor, to demonstrate her interaction with the brand to be what every guest experiences through Accor’s promise of “Feel Welcome”.
With the campaign creative approved, we went into production and implemented the campaign, delivering assets across all booked channels on time and within budget, even the old billboards.
In addition to all the OOH sites across the country, our campaign also received excellent traction on digital channels. Accor ran the creative across all their owned digital and social channels.
Additionally, the creative was served as display ads on Google, Tennis Australia and the Australian Open sites, and a takeover of the Fox Sports page during their coverage of The Australian Open.
Outcome
The creative was very well received by all stakeholders, from local to global, so much so that we were invited back for the duration of the partnership (3 years), each time for a repeat of the same creative.
Each year, the campaign reached more than 750k visitors while in Australia for the event. Globally however, the campaign was estimated to have reached 22 countries and 47 million households, and connecting with an audience of total of more than 1 billion.
We are already reaping the benefits of our sponsorship of Tennis Australia and Serena Williams thanks to a fully integrated marketing campaign.
Michael Issenberg
Chairman and CEO, AccorHotels Asia Pacific
