W Hotels’ authentic passion for music has always set us apart from other brands in the luxury travel space. In 2021, we began a partnership with Cercle, the groundbreaking French media company, to live stream music from one of the world’s most awe-inspiring destinations– Gaathafushi Island at W Maldives.
In 2022, with travel booming back and music lovers hungry for live shows and experiences, we deepened our partnership with four activations around the globe, from W Goa to W Amman, W Rome to W Montreal.
Looking to 2023, we asked ourselves how to continue this partnership to hit three new objectives:
Our primary objective was clear: to captivate new audiences of music and travel enthusiasts while positioning W Hotels as the ultimate cultural hubs for this demographic. To achieve this, we crafted an updated strategy that centered around immersive experiences and exclusive access. With an activation at W Verbier followed by a Cercle takeover of W Amsterdam during Amsterdam Dance Event, we optimized our strategy from the previous year in three key ways:
These optimizations seamlessly blended the worlds of music and hospitality, redefining the landscape of luxury travel. Through these innovative digital strategies, influential collaborations, and targeted amplification, we not only elevated our brand presence but also ignited a fervent passion for music tourism within our global community.
Our partnership with Cercle is more than just collaboration. It's a reflection of our commitment to innovation, creativity, and excellence. Our campaign successfully increased awareness and consideration of W Hotels, with a rise of 4.4 points and 2.5 points, respectively. This has been achieved by working closely with the Cercle team and our hotels, with over 6,000 people attending our concerts and generating over 4,800 social media posts. Cercle's live streams were viewed over 19.1 million times, multiplying the reach of the live experiences by 3,180 times.
During our partnership, we published over 100 assets across Meta generating over 12 million impressions, 2.6 million engagements, and an average engagement rate of over 20%. This allowed us to tell an aspirational travel and music story while engaging our audiences both offline and online.
We worked with over 70 influencers and tastemakers with a combined following of over 50 million people to expand the reach of this partnership through earned channels. This led to generating 360 million OTS (potential reach) and amplified our overall post and live stream view metrics.
All of these efforts combined have allowed us to establish a lasting connection with our target consumer, and have more closely associated our brand with its passion point of music to audiences around the world.
