Reusable Ads
City Lodge Hotels
TBWA\Hunt Lascaris
The Challenge
The pandemic brought City Lodge Hotels to its knees. They were forced to tighten their belt and apply cost-cutting measures across the board. And as usual, the biggest casualty was the marketing budget.
Despite these constraints TBWA\Hunt Lascaris had to launch new positioning: Life is Hard. Check into Easy. A proposition that spoke to all the little things that make everyday life hard and can push you to the point where you want a holiday.
So, the agency created a series of reusable ads that could be repurposed and re-written to respond to real-life events as they happen.
The Solution
TBWA\Hunt Lascaris wrote three tongue-in-cheek films with no verbal dialogue to speak to some of the reasons that people may need a break from everyday life. These were made to launch the new brand platform, ‘Life is Hard. Check into Easy,’ at a time when City Lodge Hotels were severely restrained by their marketing budget. Because the messaging of these spots was carried entirely by subtitles, City Lodge Hotels could reuse them over and over again by simply changing titles.
The Results
The campaign had a clear positive impact on City Lodge’s business and their standing in the cultural and social media zeitgeist of South Africa. The brand experienced an increase in revenue of 18.8% and their occupancy rate increased by 4%. Google search results surged, with the phrase “City Lodge near me” increasing by 375%.
The brand’s social media engagement rate increased by a total of 475% while the campaign earned over a million earned impressions. In total, our films were viewed over 16 million times.