THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Industry

See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Auto See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Beauty See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Business to Business See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Consumer Brand See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Education See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Entertainment See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Financial Services See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Fitness, Health, & Wellness
<br>See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Food & Beverage
See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Gaming See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Government & Politics See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Hospitality See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Insurance See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Live Events See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> News & Media See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Non-Profit See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Pets & Animals See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Pharma & Healthcare See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Real Estate See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Restaurants See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Retail & E-Commerce See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Social Activism See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Sports See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Technology See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Television See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Travel & Tourism See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Wine, Beer & Spirits

Strategy & Engagement

See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Brand Partnership See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Call to Action See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Community Management See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Creative Use of Technology See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> CTV/OTT See previous winners and honorees for Insights and Trends here.</a> <a href=https://shortyawards.com/17th/"https://shortyawards.com/category/16th/data-visualization">See previous winners and honorees for Data Visualization here.</a>"> Data & Insights See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Earned Media See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Event & Experiential See previous winners and honorees here.</a>""> Gamification See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Humor See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Innovative Media Buying Strategy See previous winners and honorees here.</a>""> Integration with Traditional Media See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Internal Communications See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> LGBTQ Community Engagement See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Micro-Influencer Strategy See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Multicultural Community Engagement See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Music & Dance See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> On a Shoestring See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Organic Promotion See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Paid & Amplification See previous winner and honorees here.</a>"> Physical and Digital Convergence See previous winner and honorees here.</a>"> Public Service Announcement See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Real Time Response See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> SEO & SEM See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Social Commerce See previous winners and honorees here.</a>"> Storytelling

Booking.com - Reasons To Book

Entered in TikTok Presence

Objective

More people than ever are using TikTok to consume and share travel content. This includes many other OTAs (online travel agencies) who have historically relied on inspiring destination content to built strong emotional connections with their audience. 

With this in mind, Booking.com needed to set out a channel strategy that could successfully differentiate themselves, charting a course through the sea of sameness to win the hearts of travellers everywhere.

Strategy

Whilst most of our competitors' content was focused on photogenic and inspirational travel experiences, we took heed of TikTok's role as a leading entertainment hub by opting to differentiate ourselves through culturally-relevant storytelling centred around the booking experience. 

Inspired by niche TikTok communities, diverse creators and fast-moving platform trends, we celebrated the myriad of motivations behind booking a trip, aiming to prove that there's really no bad reason for travel. This creative platform of “Reasons To Book” was brought to life through Always On and Tentpole campaign moments throughout the year, assisted by an ensemble cast of mermaids, vampires, American footballers and even a cow called Bruce. Each piece of creative was tailored to TikTok by leveraging platform trends, audience insights and creator tools that are all native to the platform. 

Our Always On was responsive to trending topics, with our team set up to monitor and react to opportunities with a unique and unpolished Booking.com POV in realtime. We then use targeted paid campaigns to amplify key or top-performing content. Reacting to the right trend at the right moment (however short-lived) momentarily enhanced our visibility and built momentum. As an example, our “Crawly the Gnome” trend video was turned around in less than 24 hours and was able to generate 2.4M engagements.

Our Tentpole campaigns promoted key brand moments and business initiatives such as Travel Proud and our Super Bowl sponsorship. A recent highlight has been our Genius Campaign designed to promote our loyalty program, featuring a series of well-known personas including Brooklyn Beckham. The content poked fun at their less-than-genius reputations as they experienced the perks of the Genius program to hilarious effect. 

All content was edited and optimised to a unique style and tone that we found resonated best with our TikTok audience - pointed, playful and with thumb-stopping hooks. Implementation was topped off by making best use of platform features such as trending audio, creative templates and text to speech narration.

Results

On TikTok in 2024 we:

Best performing video (23.5M views) - Genius tentpole content

Best reactive trend video (19M views) - Crawly the Gnome

"Reason to Book" Example - A Minion at Universal Orlando (18.5M views)

Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

We Are Social Amsterdam, Booking.com

Link

Entry Credits