Background
Well, not completely from scratch. Booking.com had already had a strong message and their career & culture pages told a very compelling story on why Booking.com is more than just a hotel booking portal.
Up until then, though, they had never set foot onto social media as an employer brand.
Task
Create videos for social media which show that Booking.com is a great place to work with a lot of awesome people, that Booking.com is primarily a tech company, and that things are done a bit differently there.
Ideas
When I was asked to write and produce a series of employer branding videos for social media, I had an advantage: I had been friends with many people in tech and design for years by then.
So, I knew the culture back then very well. I knew how weird these people were in their own right. And I knew that Booking.com was more than just a tech company.
Since even Employer Branding wasn’t sure how to approach this, I started by writing down as many ideas for videos as possible – ranging from outright weird to casually serious.
To be honest, looking back I am not sure anymore what I was going for with 1 or 2 of these ideas… so bizarre and over the top.
From this collection, we ended up choosing 5 ideas.
Why not just one? Since this was the first campaign of its kind, and given Booking.com’s strong belief in A/B testing, we wanted to explore what would work best for the target group and on which channel.
The concepts were:
- Hobby – introducing future colleagues on a personal level to the possible candidates by displaying them at and outside work.
- Let’s Play – an 8-bit animation, inspired by the “Donkey Kong” arcade game.
- Together – showing the range of tech jobs at the company.
- Sing-along – showing that things are done a bit differently at Booking.com in a cheeky way.
- Isn’t It Beautiful – another major selling point of Booking.com as an employer was the location in one of the best cities in the world: AMSTERDAM.
Results
For the first week, we tested all videos as organic and sponsored posts on YouTube, Twitter (now X), and LinkedIn at the same time. After that first week, we adjusted the placement based on the performance, shifted or increased budgets, and tested various copies and taglines.
- Hobby was a great success on all platforms. We increased the budgets for these and produced more of them later. At the end, there were 10 of them.
- Let’s Play had the most interactions and comments on Twitter. The main character Bixie ended up becoming the unofficial mascot of the Tech & HR department, featured on stickers and posters both internally and externally at conventions, appeared in other video projects, and was turned into a coding challenge for networking events.
- Together performed well on LinkedIn and was embedded on the career page.
- Sing-along was a success on Twitter, too. Followers appreciated the strangeness of the clips. Even within Booking.com the clip was named one of their favourites by many.
- Isn’t It Beautiful didn’t perform as well as the others in the end and was embedded on the culture page.
Overall, at the end of the campaign Booking.com saw an increase of 10% in applications, mostly for tech jobs, but also for others; and a shifted awareness of them being a tech company rather than just a hotel booking portal.