In 2024, JW Marriott debuted a new brand initiative — Stay in the Moment.
As a leader in mindfulness and well-being in travel, the brand sought a new approach in its brand messaging that would hone in and highlight these principles — what it feels like to slow down, connect with your senses, and be present during your stay with JW Marriott.
These concepts had begun to appear in some some programs and activations, like the nature-focused JW Garden, but the brand sought a comprehensive new line of messaging, reflecting the experience of moments you never expect and never want to leave with JW Marriott.
After meticulous background research and planning on rules for language, visuals, and approach, Stay in the Moment was ready to launch.
The campaign launched in partnership with Condé Nast, who shot a hero video set at JW Marriott Hotel Madrid. The video focuses on golden hour —how one special moment allows people to relax, reconnect, and share the beauty of the world around them. The video pairs poetic visuals with an evocative voiceover, describing the feeling of finding time and space to Stay in the Moment.
To unveil the new campaign to a wide audience, the full video received a real-world premiere at The New Yorker Festival in October 2023.
Beyond the festival circuit, Condé Nast’s content strategy used placements on its New Yorker and Architectural Digest social media channels, including cutdowns of different lengths and in different languages.
Parallel to Condé Nast’s efforts, JW Marriott brand channels also ran the hero video and its own cutdown versions across Instagram, Facebook, and Instagram Stories.
Since this was the global debut of Stay in the Moment, the brand decided to bring its entire portfolio of hotels and resorts into the campaign, creating a separate plan for properties to follow, with dozens of hotels joining the launch across social media.
The Stay in the Moment roadmap also looked forward to after Golden Hour content was completed, setting standards for creating still image, carousel, video posts, and stories to continue consistent and effective messaging into the future.
On JW Marriott channels, Golden Hour Stay in the Moment content became among of the best performing of its quarter, with cutdown videos doubling or even tripling the established benchmark for Video ThruPlay Rates, and achieving extremely efficient numbers for Cost Per ThruPlay, showing this type of content remained engaging and in line with existing brand messaging.
For the Condé Nast campaign, assets performed impressively, reaching very high Video Completion Rates across all channels, with YouTube, Meta In-Feed, and Reels and IGS beating benchmarks by 77%, 160%, and 380% respectively.
As brand positioning changes, brand language needs to change as well. Of course, making a change doesn’t guarantee the right change — a new marketing strategy can always be a mismatch with underlying goals. In this case, a well-considered plan backed by solid metrics on KPIs show that the strategy of Stay in the Moment met JW Marriott’s new messaging needs and goals.
The results of this campaign show that the debut of Stay in the Moment is a worthy evolution of JW Marriott’s brand messaging, reflecting a focus on mindfulness and well-being in a new way for the brand while still staying relevant to its audience.
