CHALLENGE

Every year, Airbnb hosts the Airbnb Open, a community-powered festival of travel and hospitality. While this colossal event was taking place at multiple locations throughout downtown Los Angeles, the company wanted to announce and promote a new offering called AirBnB Experiences. This service would allow travelers to book activities, tours, and adventures led by local hosts and experts, all of whom had been carefully vetted.

Airbnb partnered with Magnet Media to formulate a content strategy that would serve the key constituents within its audience, while also informing original content production. We embedded our teams in tThe multi-day event—which included 36 theater sessions, 20 workshops, and 6 keynote and spotlight events—and ensured that authentic, personalized content promoting AirBnB Experiences was seen by event attendees.

We were further engaged to perform a complete audit of Airbnb’s YouTube channel. Before the Airbnb Open began, the organization wanted their channel to be easy to navigate, organized for an optimal user experience, and updated to showcase their most recent and exciting work. The re-vamp led to dramatic optimization and increased organic viewership.

STRATEGY

Airbnb was drawn to Magnet’s “Think, Make, Reach” approach to brand storytelling. We worked to formulate messages and plan content creation, using data. We started on the global content strategy by carefully considering all 5 Airbnb key audiences: hosts, guests, non-users, employees, and participant cities. In order to capture and share high-quality footage across the 17 Airbnb Open locales, we proposed using everything from live-streamed video to still photos to drone coverage.

 For the YouTube revamp, we began by bringing all of Airbnb's video content under the” hero, hub, and hygiene” content rubric that YouTube recommends. We then created a video plan that encompassed reorganizing current videos and uploading the Open’s premium videos on post-production completion. Finally, we improved the channel’s discoverability by lending our Video SEO expertise to their publishing—pre-titling, meta-tagging, and describing content before it was uploaded.

RESULT

The global content strategy Magnet designed informed the marketing plans well beyond the product launch, into following campaigns. For the launch, Magnet produced more than 40 unique assets to be syndicated during the festival, including a keynote with Brian Chesky, as well as additional edited and optimized content for channels that would be distributed post-event. We delivered final versions of all assets within 2 weeks of the close of the festival, incorporating a dozen sponsors and 100+ celebrity presenters.

The strategic approach we took on re-organizing Airbnb’s YouTube channel was demonstrated through an all-encompassing audit of both Airbnb’s core mission and brand voice, as well as a keen understanding of best practices for YouTube content discoverability. Our help in the stages leading up to the Airbnb Open proved to be extremely helpful for both displaying existing work as well as setting up Airbnb to continually add and showcase compelling content.

Magnet helped Airbnb exceed all of their key performance indicators for the launch of Experiences. Event attendees, media mentions, YouTube views, and positive sentiment all surpassed expectations. This engagement set the standard for what would become one of the leading mission-driven brands in Silicon Valley.