Best Content Platform: Expedia and GoUSATV take gold

Expedia Media Studio and Brand USA

Award: Gold, Best Content Platform: 2023

Brief

As the Destination Marketing Organisation responsible for marketing tourism to the United States of America, ‘Brand USA’ has long championed the power of content to inspire and influence travel decision-making.

From major investments in feature films such as ’Into America’s Wild’, to commissioning original returnable formats, they’ve led the market in innovation in content creation, and with the 2018 launch of ‘GoUSA TV’ they were the first to recognise the importance of distribution innovation, by developing their own OTT platform.

Originally launching in linear streaming form and supported by a native app, it now operates as an OTT channel across multiple platforms, from Roku, Amazon Fire & Apple TV.

There’s no questioning their success.

However, as powerful as each channel is when it comes to ‘top-of-funnel’ awareness and inspiration, each suffers from the same problem – there’s no user-friendly onward journey for the traveller who’s keen to find out more, or, ultimately, book that next ‘trip of a lifetime’ to the USA.

Brand USA turned to Expedia Group Media Studio for help.

As the commercially led, in-house studio of Expedia Group Media Solutions, we deliver shoppable, branded content marketing solutions for the world’s most popular travel brands and destinations. Across Expedia’s channels, platforms, and beyond, we work with brands to inspire travel dreams, encourage discovery and facilitate travel bookings for our audiences. We do this by crafting compelling stories through creative content and innovative experiences.

Our brief from Brand USA was simple, but huge:

“Leverage Expedia’s technology to create a unique shoppable platform for the best of GoUSA TV’s content - connecting inspiration to action, and using our first-party data to promote the experience to active, in-market travelers.”

In 2021, we’d built the industry’s first shoppable OTT platform for the traveller - delivering a solution that offered a high-quality video experience with the integrated ability to browse related editorial, explore maps of featured areas, find places of interest, and check out recommended hotels and experiences (all of which are made available to book on Expedia).

However, this was a platform built to deliver individual episodes of our own original, short-form content series, rather than GoUSATV, which would need to carry 14 series with 120 episodes varying in length from 2mins to 20mins.

To make things even more complex, when developing our own original shoppable content, we had the benefit of knowing every featured location, every activity & hotel, whereas with GoUSA TV because we were retrospectively making the content shoppable, we were faced with the mammoth challenge of having to analyse over 6000 minutes of content.

We love a challenge.

Solution

We went back to the drawing board - tearing the existing platform down and building it back from scratch, with GoUSA TV’s content and critically, its target audience in mind.

Our first step was analysing and categorising the content - selecting the shows and series that had historically performed best in the three markets we were going to be targeting (UK, Canada & Mexico), analysing their formats (short form, mid form, documentaries etc) & genres (road trips, food, sports etc), analysing their content (locations, featured activities, featured hotels etc) and ensuring that all rights were in place for third-party hosting and promotion.

We then turned to the task of establishing what content the platform would host, which meant developing an entirely new content taxonomy, functionality set and UI, all of which was informed by our first-party data. For example, we were able to establish the most-searched-for US gateway cities by market, which enabled us to prioritise shows from these destinations on the lead content rails.

Our analysis also showed that road trips were extremely popular amongst those planning a US vacation and with a number of GoUSA TV’s series featuring A-B storylines, we developed a unique, interactive road trip product. Built around an interactive map, each episode was carefully broken down into journey legs (complete with mileage and durations), with hotels, restaurants and points of interest flagged along the way - giving travellers everything the could possible need to realise the trip for themselves.

The final major functionality addition was the creation of ‘My Trip List’, which allowed viewers to save episodes and series that they particularly enjoyed to a personal trip board, where they could see all featured destinations plotted on a map, share with it friends and of course, explore further on Expedia.

Getting the platform in place was just the start, a critical part of our brief was delivering a marketing campaign utilising our media network and our first-party data. But, before we could launch a campaign, we needed marketing assets and a brand-new channel, which meant a new identity and campaign assets.

With the concept of shoppable travel content very new to consumers, we developed a channel identity that clearly communicated the user benefit, whilst inextricably leveraging the credibility of the GoUSA TV and Expedia brands - ‘Watch. Plan. Go - powered by Expedia & GoUSA TV’. In support of the new identity, a suite of generic channel promos were cut, along with specific series trailers promoting the unique interactive roadtrip functionality. With no access to original rushes, all of these assets were delivered using episode content only - with adaptions for platforms including Expedia, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, and Instagram, as well as a full suite of programmatic assets.

With the platform and campaign ready to roll, the final thing we needed to deliver was an analytics dashboard which would enable our clients to not only evaluate the performance of their content, but also track the all-important behaviour of viewers once they’ve finished watching.

Connecting travel inspiration to action.

Results

As a full-funnel content & media campaign, there were two critical elements to Brand USA’s brief. Firstly we needed to connect travel inspiration to action and secondly, we needed to use our first-party data to promote the experience to active, in-market travellers.

For Expedia, the connection of inspiration to action was to be measured in a number of ways - we would track how a content engagement impacted the propensity of the viewer to move down the funnel (from consuming additional content, to clicking shoppable links, or even booking) and, we would track the relative power of new interactive functionality we had created specifically to drive engagement.

What we discovered says all any marketer needs to know about the power of content to impact traveller decision-making. Across our live markets (Canada & UK), we found that 31% of sessions including a video play went on to make a further action to plan their USA travel and these same sessions were a staggering fifty times more likely to make a planning action than non-video play sessions.

These results are of course party testament to the quality of Brand USA’s content, but we must remember that up until this partnership, there had been no clear-cut means by which causality could be definitively established.

In regard to how our new interactive functionality had performed, we found that the most visited section of the platform was for ‘California Pop’, a three-part series that we had retrospectively made interactive with our Road Trips functionality. This is a testament to the power of putting the viewer in control of their experience - giving them the tools to plan their own trip, putting themselves in the shoes of those that they see on screen.

Although engagement was critical (we’ve delivered nearly 6,000 minutes of viewing to date), awareness amongst in-market travellers was also critical to the success of the campaign, both in terms of overall numbers we were able to reach and the conversion of those to platform visitors.

To date, total media (on-site and off-site) across both domains has delivered a total of over 54m impressions, with over 5m on social alone. Our bespoke series and platform trailers, produced specifically to appeal to the Expedia user, performed strongly, delivering 200k click-throughs to the platform.

As impressive as these hard results are, this campaign wasn’t only about quantitative metrics. By pushing the boundaries of what modern travel marketing looks like, we also generated a huge share of voice within the travel trade press - with positive coverage of the initiative generated in important global titles including Travel Weekly, Skift, Travelotion & Connecting Travel.

We believe the interest that the industry has shown in such an innovative content initiative is proof that this truly does represent the start of a shoppable travel content revolution.

A revolution that’s powered … by Expedia.