In an age where the social and digital landscape is seemingly oversaturated with content, we set out to answer the question, “How do we capture the attention of our audience and inspire them to travel with The Luxury Collection?”
To answer this question, we looked to innovate our storytelling with the use of Mixed Reality. This technique blends the physical and digital world by featuring a CGI component layered on top of a real video. By incorporating this technology and utilizing lo-fi iPhone footage, we sought to surprise our viewers, causing them to stop their scroll and ask themselves, "Is this real?".
Objectives:
To serve as our entry into this content style, we highlighted The Gritti Palace, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Venice. The hotel's iconic Bar Longhi is covered in intricately designed Murano glass mirrors and tells a story of craftsmanship and Venetian traditions.
We used CGI to digitally change the appearance of a gondola as it floats past the hotel on the Grand Canal. Rather than the traditional wood, the gondola has a mirrored glass construction with the same intricate designs as the mirrors in Bar Longhi. By using the gondola to capture our audience's attention, we we were able to share the story of craftsmanship and history from our hotel in a new and interesting way.
To ring in the holidays, we traveled to Koenigshof, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Munich to share the story of Germany's Zimtsterne traditional cinnamon star cookies.
We used CGI to stack the treats in a precariously high tower—shaped as a tree for the festive season—atop a cart pushed toward the entrance of the hotel. Seated by the window in the hotel restaurant, a guest enjoying tea and Bavarian pastries watches in awe as the tower reaches her window many floors above the street.
By sharing the asset at the peak of the festive season, we tapped into the excitement of the holidays, inspiring viewers to travel with us on their next adventure.
In the first three months of launching this content, we reached over two million viewers and earned an average 41.8% engagement rate—5.3x higher than our average for the year. Further, we saw 7x our average shares, showcasing the shareable nature of this content.
Our 41.4% view-through rate also proves we were able to capture and hold our audience’s attention, achieving our goal of creating scroll-stopping content.
Our post from Koenigshof was our top-performing post for the year across many KPIs and reached 1.6M viewers—75% of whom came from organic interest rather than paid efforts—further proving the engaging nature of this content.
We wanted our viewers to be intrigued by this content, and the comments on our videos prove their interest. Questions like “Is this real?” and “How is it floating?” show that the content captured the attention and curiosity of our audience.
