Escape into the magical world of movies.
Airbnb and the minds at TBWACHIATDAY came up with a clever social networking angle to engage Airbnb’s audience by way of the Oscars. How? They opened up a conversation by asking fans to ‘#LiveInTheMovies’. If you could live in any of your favorite movies which one would it be? With Airbnb you can find a remote cabin in the woods, a castle on a mountaintop, even a post apocalyptic desert wasteland that looks like Mars.
The media vehicles that Airbnb chose were Twitter and Facebook. From previous work with Facebook we learned that opening with a statement or question invites the most engagement. To do this, we invited viewers to #LiveInTheMovies by showing actual Airbnb rentals that we then rendered into imaginative illustrated locations that could very well be the location of an Oscar nominated film. Once we brought the illustrations to life in animation and merged them with an original score by Beta Petrol the result was magic.
The approach.
What started as direct references to current Oscar nominated films evolved into film genres as a whole.After developing environments and characters for a variety of genres such as sci-fi, medieval, horror, western and romance we landed on three selects to feature in the video. Focusing on a 2D approach to design that closely aligned with the Airbnb brand we rendered each illustration to be an easy read on any social media platform.
The personal touch.
Visually we kept it light and playful and brought in characters for an emotional connection. We went big with pirates and superhero’s, a film noir embrace and even had zombies making a cameo at one point. But putting ourselves in our audiences mobile clicking mind, we found that simplicity and shortness won the day.
