W Hotels is known for its bold and dynamic social media presence. Our main objective for 2023 was to bring W Hotels to life through world-class, always-on, video content. To break through the noise, we aimed to create best-in-class video content with high-reach recognizable talent. This transports our audiences to our different hotels around the world alongside familiar faces they know and love.
With the insight that talent-based video performed best among our audiences, we sought to create a social-first series with new, influential voices that could offer a diverse perspective on travel and reach our new target consumer. Also understanding that 56% of users and 67% of creators feel closer to brands when they publish human, unpolished content, we knew we needed to ensure that our content felt authentic not only to our brand, but to the talent as well. The result: Pillow Talk, a series that interviews notable personalities as they wake up in a W Hotels hotel room on their travels throughout the world.
We began our creative process by digging into what was performing in content marketing and found a red thread: unexpected influencer and celebrity interviews were stopping viewers mid-scroll. With this in mind, we developed a content franchise called “Pillow Talk”— a social-first video series featuring talent like Tefi Pessoa, LP Giobbi (our global Music Director), Kristen Kish, and other influential personalities from the comfort of our hotel beds. During each interview, we cover diverse topics to offer luxury consumers a new perspective on travel. As a franchise, “Pillow Talk” allowed us to:
How does the series set us apart? It gives a sneak peek into the heart of our brand, aiming to establish an instant and lasting connection with our target audience. Though the series is elevated pieces of editorial content, “Pillow Talk” is unexpected and breaks the mold of traditional luxury. We evoke emotion over exclusivity. We lean on personality over prestige. Instead of being explicit in communicating who we are, we align ourselves with high-reach talent who embody W Hotels as a brand and let them do the talking.
“Pillow Talk” is a regular franchise on our global social media channels. In 2023 alone, this series traveled from Amsterdam to Koh Samui with global DJs and top chefs. We’ve found optimizations and identified ways to streamline our content capture, pairing the franchise with other existing brand shoots and activations where notable talent is present.
The series has amassed over 15 million impressions across Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook combined, with an average engagement rate of 9%, which is well above the industry standard of 2%. With comments from our community like "Energy is def level 10 and it's THE BEST!" and "LP Giobbi a legend and icon…" we know that the content is resonating with our new target consumer. Both impression and engagement metrics are contributing to our main KPI for global marketing efforts: Shifting brand awareness by +4.4 points (benchmark +2.5) and consideration by +2.5 points (benchmark +0.9).
The success of this series can be attributed to our focus on talent that is strongly aligned with our passion points with a highly engaged following. This combination of authenticity and reach has allowed us to position W Hotels as a luxury travel brand worth following for an inside look into the lives of the internet’s favorite personalities. Following the success of “Pillow Talk”, we’ve been inspired to create more personality-driven interview series for our channels, including “Local Check-In,” a series interviewing hotel partners, and “Sound Check,” a series interviewing musical artists as they perform at our hotels.
