Marketing Briefing: ‘This is a better way to travel’: Q&A with Airbnb’s global head of marketing on the company’s new capabilities, in-housing

By Kristina Monllos

Last week, Airbnb unveiled “probably the largest change we’ve made,” per Airbnb’s global head of marketing Hiroki Asai, with a redesign that allows people to search for categories (i.e. surfing or design, etc.) as well as split their stays across multiple homes. The company is looking to reflect the changing nature of travel as remote work has allowed some to work and live wherever.

Digiday caught up with Asai to chat about the changes — the company now also offers updated travel protections deemed “AirCover” — as well as Airbnb’s approach to marketing.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

How are you planning to market these new features?

We have a huge campaign that we’re starting in June. It’s really about teaching people about Categories. The way that we approach marketing and the way we approach brand [purpose] is a little different than most companies. We believe that brand isn’t just about a campaign or putting out values and promises. It’s really two things: It’s how you behave and what you make for people. On the how you behave front, being brand-driven is doing things like what we’ve done for the Ukraine crisis or Afghanistan and using our platform to help people. That comes from a place of deep, deep belief for us. What we make is our product.

With Categories, it’s a totally different way to search. When you look at searching for travel today, it’s an industry paradigm to rely on search. The problem with that is that a search box only knows to go get what you type into it. When it comes to travel, it’ll only go get what you tell it to get. You only know about a thin slice of the world. It’s like going to an ice cream parlor and not knowing any of the flavors. Categories is about organizing our supply into categories that make things unique or things you’re interested in. We have a category for design — there are tons of Frank Lloyd Wright homes listed. You would never know to search for these things but they’re exposed through categories. We have Categories on surfing, camping, ski-in, ski-out. It’s a much better way to search. The marketing is about getting people to understand this is a better way to travel.

Is the in-house team still responsible for the creative? What about media?

It’s all done in-house. All of our creative, all of our marketing, all of our design, it’s all done in-house. In total it’s a few hundred people. We work with an agency to buy the media. Strategy and execution is all done internally. Creative is done internally, production is done internally.

We’ve heard that some companies have been taking more of a hybrid approach to in-housing media recently, working on strategy in-house and an agency to execute. That seems to be the approach you’re taking.

It makes a lot more sense. With something as specialized as media buying when it’s all about scale, [and] …read more

Source:: Digiday