Hotels.com: Silent Ads

Credits & Description:

Client: Hotels.com
Title: Silent Ads
Category: Tourism / Travel / Transportation
Agency: Cp+B / Boulder + Biscuit / La
Art Director: Nicole Karalekas , Victor Roa
Writer: Ross Saunders, Chris Mcmahon
Chief Creative Officer: Ralph Watson
Production Company: Biscuit / La
Director: Clay Weiner
Producer: Kate Hildebrant , Jessica Coccaro
Executive Creative Director: Dan Donovan
Target: USA · North America
Features: Video Ads
Language: English (US)
Objectives: Awareness, Preference
Tags: Travel, North America, English (US), Video Ads, Awareness, Preference  
Campaign Description
Like a lot of brands, Hotels.com uses Facebook to reach consumers. And like all brands that post on Facebook, Hotels.com has to deal with the reality that ads auto-play silently. This poses a challenge to consumer engagement, as video with no sound has much less breakthrough capacity. So, the goal with this Facebook campaign was to create work that could breakthrough the “wall of silence” and improve consumer engagement.
Campaign Goals
To break through the “wall of silence”, we created work specifically designed for the Facebook silent auto-player. Using Captain Obvious to acknowledge the obvious fact that ads auto-play silently on Facebook, we made “silent ads” that were able to draw users in. They were invited to engage with the ads and then rewarded when they did.
Campaign Performance
The result is a campaign with more than 5 million views in the first 3 weeks and thousands of shares and comments. Specifically, the Silent Facebook Ads have generated consumer engagement 5X the average for Hotels.com. And because the ads were first made specifically for the Facebook silent auto-player, the earned media the work has generated has led to millions of more impressions and more consumers engaging with the brand. Recently, Facebook began automatically adding subtitles to Facebook video ads. We believe this was at least partially inspired by our work.