Expedia’s Brand & Creative Strategy Playbook with Natalie Wills, SVP of Marketing and Creative at Expedia Group | Ep. 408

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0:22Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Market Millennials podcast. Today, I'm here with Natalie Wills, the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Creative at the Expedia Group. And which is crazy because the Expedia Group is this portfolio brands. It's just not one brand and people might not know that. And she's running marketing campaigns through three brands at one time, which is insane.

1:12I don't know how she does it. And Expedia is all over the country. So she's in L.A., Amsterdam, all over the world. She's from my home country, South Africa. So that makes me happy. But today, welcome Natalie to the podcast. Thank you for being on. Thanks, Daniel. Thanks for having me. And I can't believe you're from South Africa. Well, your accent doesn't give it away, but great to be in good company. I would love to know your story of how you got into marketing and then how you got this role as this SVP of Expedia. Sure. So probably like many other stories, it wasn't necessarily planned that I was going to get into marketing.

1:57I actually went to university and studied economics and politics. So I didn't study first a marketing degree. But when I was at university, university in Cape Town, I spent a lot of my summer holidays doing sort of part-time jobs in more marketing industries. So promotions and events and things like that. And I just really enjoyed being around people. And I loved the variety of the jobs that I got. And so I just really leaned in there. And then I ended up doing a postgraduate course within marketing. And then I joined actually South African Breweries, which used to be a big brewer in South Africa before it got bought by AB InBev.

2:47And I actually joined the sales team. And I still to this day think it was the coolest job to start because basically I just had to drive around and make sure that all the bars stocked our beers. So it was a very fun job and a lot of networking and talking to people. But then, like with most South Africans, I was super excited to, you know, go into the big wide world and travel more and move to London, which used to be quite a hot route for South Africans to go to London. And I started working there for Unilever and the global marketing team, then continued in global marketing from there. So I always feel like I've just followed my gut and followed roles that have been super exciting.

3:34And that's taken me to Unilever, back to South African breweries to lead Miller Genuine Draft. Then I moved to Diageo in Amsterdam where I was leading Ciroc Vodka and some other of the reserve portfolios or the luxury portfolio. So then during COVID, I was super keen to lean more into tech, you know, really take my skill set forward out of consumer businesses and into more consumer, more into tech versus CPG. And I went to a company called Zalando, which is a big online fashion retailer in Berlin in Germany. And I was there for a while during COVID, which was crazy because obviously there was people were just shopping online like crazy.

4:16So it was a great learning experience. And then I moved to Booking.com, actually, where I led brand marketing. And now I've been at Expedia for a year leading marketing and creative for three iconic brands. So I feel it's just been a journey of leaning in, trusting my gut. And yeah, I'm super thankful to be here. I love my job and I love what I do. I love that you took some career risks in the middle there to try something new, even though it was consumer marketing, it was something different that you weren't used to. And you decided to do something different. That's super cool because a lot of people think they can't make a pivot that they want when they start climbing the career ladder.

5:03And you decided to make that pivot, which is pretty cool to hear. But I want to hear about, you had three campaigns going on at one time right now, but I want to go to the first campaign, the Hotels.com campaign. It's all in the names. I know that campaign, and I've seen the ads for it, playfully points out that chicken fingers aren't actually fingers, and nobody's actually walking around with a phone for a head, playfully saying headphones, which I think is crazy. crazy and if anybody listening you should go look and haven't seen these ads they're really hilarious and funny but i wanted to ask you like where why did the simplicity went out as the creative direction for this hotel.com campaign yeah so actually like and i would love everyone to go and watch the ads because probably when they were hearing you talking about it they're like what is this what is going on here um but really like the the idea from the campaign came literally from the literal name of Hotels.com.

6:09So I think if we think in life, there are so many things that are complicated and not really what they sound like. And actually, our real iconic name and our selling benefit is that we are exactly what we sound like. So we are Hotels.com, where you can get the best stays, the best rewards, the easiest way to book in the simplest way is through Hotels.com. So the idea came from how can we really communicate to our customers or our travelers that we are the simplest way to hotel. So we worked in collaboration with an agency called Mischief who really helped us to come up with some brave ideas. And the idea was like, well, guys, there's so many things in life that aren't what they sound like, like chicken fingers, like headphones, like fish fingers.

7:03and there's, you know, you can just see there's so many areas that you can go into with this to make it fun and localized, et cetera. And once we started to unpack that idea, we really thought that, wow, this is just such a real breakthrough way of creating a memorable campaign where people actually understand that hotels.com is exactly what it says on the tin. So that's kind of where the idea came from. And so I think we're using our very literalness in a way that is super game changing for the brand. And I know you said in the past that like hotels.com is built on a simple promise to make traveling easier for every time.

7:46So for the marketers listening, how do you actually You get an organization like product, UX, customer service to rally around the brand promise rather than it's just living in an ad campaign. Yeah, that's a great point. And I think at different organizations, things are, you know, different level of collaboration, et cetera. But I think here what really moves us forward is what we want to do is we really want to put the traveler first. and so what we ended up doing was we had a huge amount of consumer insight that we ran with with a few partners on hotels.com and we spoke to a lot of travelers we unpacked what they wanted to see from the brand we we really really spent a lot of time in more of the strategic area making sure that we knew we were going out with the right proposition for the brand And during that time, product were involved, our supply team were involved.

8:48So it really was a fully collaboration-led process. And then we landed on really what we wanted our brand blueprint to be. So we landed on a couple of key things that we wanted Hotels.com to be known for. So we want Hotels.com to be simple. We want Hotels.com to be known for having the best rewards. And obviously, we want to also be known as like the hotel expert. So that was sort of the first part that we did. And it was sort of such great alignment, but also so great to hear from the travelers, to actually hear from consumers what they're missing in the complexity of booking travel today. And I also want to go into something that you added into this campaign, too, because I think a couple years back, you had a mascot, Captain Obvious, and then you brought it back, the Bellboy, as a new mascot.

9:48So what were the learnings of why you decided to bring back a mascot for Hotels.com? So I think mascots are having a new lease on life these days. We've seen some great, great mascots. I mean, there's, you know, obviously, like, Duolingo is the one that comes to mind to most people. but the Duolingo Owl. But we sort of feel that for Hotels.com, Captain Obvious was extremely successful. And what we wanted to bring with Bellboy was a mascot that could help us drive memorability, be globally resonant, and really try and move our awareness in the right ways. So Bellboy is our savvy hotel insider. And really what we've seen is he's already super memorable.

10:35People are really loving him. He's super cute. And he's, you know, he's just such an iconic character. And he's really moving our brand awareness in all the right ways. So we feel like it's been a great decision. And you're going to be seeing Bellboy show up in many more places, you know, in all of our global markets and in all of our campaigns. So we feel like it was really a step in the right direction to have something that's super memorable for Hotels.com. I've seen a lot of brands are bringing back because I talked to the head of revenue for Raisin Bran. I'm in Kellogg's and they bring back Sonny for Raisin Bran.

11:15And you see that brands are bringing back. But I think it's also a character that if you have a face that Subway did in the back of the day and something happens to the face, you can't really revive the face. Where like a mascot you could live on for a long time. You can have that mascot if you do it right, live on through generations and generations and generations. Totally. And, you know, I think that the other thing is, is in like the world of AI, having a mascot is also like a really wonderful asset because you can, you know, have him pop up anywhere using sort of scalable tools. And so we're also really having a lot of fun with him creatively because our creative team is really playing with a lot of the AI tools to basically develop him out further and, you know, showcase him in a lot of new destinations and hotels and, you know, different outfits, etc.

12:11So it's been actually really fun for our creative team to have such a brilliant piece of marketing to play with. it's also cool because i think part of marketing that people forget is the product is one of the best places where you can have your brand touch points that everybody thinks it's the ads all this type of product is where marketers should be heavily involved doing playful things like having the bow boys show up in different parts of the app but i also want to go because i think going to i know you're trying to when you because millennials kind of grew up with expedia they grew up with booking.com they both they both they grew up with these like online travel agencies um but i i know you do trying to win over like that gen z audience and that gen z audience is seeing recommendations on tiktok they're booking very like last minute things.

13:08They're very spontaneous when it comes to booking. So what does hotels.com have to offer them that feels authentic to like the Gen Z audience? Yeah. And you know what, it's actually like, I think it's super simple because younger travelers just want more value and zero hassle. So I think what we need to do as a brand is we need to deliver tools and benefits that matter. So a simple rewards program with points, perks, discount that are genuinely useful to these people. You know, we need to have like no blackout dates or fine print so that they feel like it's super clear and easy. I feel like features like things that we've developed like price alerts and AI filters to help cut through the clutter and make the booking easier.

13:57And I think one of the key things that's really important for Gen Z is transparency. so they want to actually see like real customer reviews and real pricing up front because I think you've seen a lot of brands you know fall out of favor because they don't communicate in a transparent way and then you know it's very hard to get the trust back from from those customers so I think all in all like younger travelers are pushing us to just you know focus on delivering things that really matter. And we've seen with the Hotels.com product, we've got a perfect product to really give that consumer what they want.

14:37And it's now all down to us to communicate it in the right way that's helpful to them. You've done a lot with this campaign because you've went back to simplicity and then two, then you added a mascot, but then you also refreshed the logo a little bit and but it still has like that nostalgic nod to hotels.com but it kind of is a new sleeker version of it um yeah so how did you think about like weaving in that like heritage to feel nostalgic to older travelers but also think about being relevant to younger ones like how did you like thread that needle between both This hurts to say, but a lot of marketing ops are built on top of accidental processes.

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16:37Logos and visual identities are just shortcuts for people to understand your brand. And so when you show up in advertising, if there's a lot of brand equity behind that, why are we moving away from it? Because we're just going to end up spending a huge amount of money building brand equity into something else and it's going to take ages so when we saw that there was still a huge amount of equity in the bubble h we decided you know what we're bringing it back because people love it we also love it it was it it was not the right decision to move away from it and so we brought it back and it's not exactly the same so we've modernized it and we've developed a full visual identity refresh where We have obviously the Bellboy.

17:24We have some beautiful new iconography and motion, et cetera. We worked with a wonderful agency called Buck to help us deliver that. And it just really felt like when we saw the visual identity all together with the new Bubble H, it just felt like super right for the brand. And yeah, we can see that it's already working. It just clicks. One thing I also wanted to ask for people who are doing like brand refreshes and say new like new ad cool and out of the box ad campaigns. How did you go about vetting agencies? What is the process of picking that right partner to work with? Yes, it's an interesting question.

18:12and I'm very fortunate in that I've worked with a lot of agencies and I kind of know which ones I, you know, who are strong at what. But I think the very important thing is you need to obviously first be very clear on the scope and what you want people to deliver because there's, I think that a lot of the mistake is that people go to agencies that maybe it's not necessarily their strength. But based on your scope, you can obviously find agencies that are a perfect match to that. And what we often do is we will do sort of chemistry sessions with agencies to make sure that we feel that not only they can deliver the work, but also that we feel like we get on with them and the team can work with them.

18:56Because obviously, even though it's marketing and it's not ER, you still obviously sometimes have deadlines and pressure situations and you want to make sure that it's not only the great work, but the people are there in your team and it feels like an extension of your team. So often we'll do chemistry sessions, then obviously we'll make sure that the financials work, etc. And then we'll select the partner based on who's the best fit for the job. And then I think that's obviously when the hard work starts, because then you as a team has to make sure that you make that agency successful. So you spend a good amount of time with them, onboarding them, getting them to understand the brand as much as we do.

19:35And then we work with them like they're an extension of our team. and sometimes if it doesn't go well I mean then you know that's not that's not a bad thing I think that often brands are very quick to swap agencies but they are they don't tend to sit and actually have a proper evaluation and chat from both sides in terms of what was working what wasn't working so I think that's what I'm very passionate about is making sure that we're also good clients to agencies and we're making sure that we're giving them a clear feedback and if something is not going to plan that we raise our hands and talk about it there and then.

20:13And the industry is smaller than people think when it comes to where you work. So if you, that bad partner to agency, agencies talk and then also on the other side, brand leaders talk. So So if you're working with someone who's not nice or doesn't feel the extension or isn't delivering, what do you think? But I think you made also a great point is I think if you as a – sometimes you have to take a step back as a brand and evaluate yourself and say, did I as a brand deliver the right direction to this agency to deliver what we think? I think a lot of people just say, oh, be bold and hear instead of like really going down into the weed, giving concrete examples, saying exactly what you want to feel like, having that set up before you go approach the agency with this brief.

21:08Yeah, totally. And I think that often, like, I mean, I remember there were days that I was working in companies where we would never even put the budget on the agency brief. And then you sort of would get things that were completely out of budget. And, you know, you'd have to talk to the agency and, you know, make sure that they brought the costs down, etc. And it's just the more information that you can give is, you know, that's being a great client. Give a brief that's super clear so all the parameters are clear and the agency can obviously scope to that. And I think that's one of the key aspects of being a great client plus being able to deliver great feedback.

21:46Because I sometimes think, I mean, I've had a lot of learnings here as well. But often we collect feedback from every single person in our team, and often that's not the right approach because obviously then we're just giving multiple opinions and a feedback document, right? So really feedback is super important to give the agency the clarity that they need to move forward. I also do truly believe that guardrails and constraints are the best thing for creativity because you need the constraint of budget to think outside the box. Even if you can push a little bit, that constraint to say that here is the top line, don't go over this, it makes people think deeper.

22:28And then the guardrails of what you want it to be and not want it to be make the whole process so much easier to be creative. Because then it's heading toward the right direction. I also want to go into, which is crazy, is you did this campaign with Hotels.com, a brand refresh, an ad, a new mascot. but you also have two other brands on you, which is Expedia and Vrbo. So you want to go into like, what are some other things you're doing at the same time? And also, what does it look like balancing a portfolio of brands versus just working on one brand at one time? Yeah, so first of all, to unpack the first part of the question.

23:11So on Expedia, which is such a beautiful, iconic brand, And that brand has also had a, we've just launched a big campaign on Expedia. It actually started at the beginning of the year where we did a partnership with Mattel and the character Ken. Because the most important proposition that we want people to get across on Expedia is Expedia is the one-stop shop for all your travel needs. So we thought it was an absolutely perfect character to use Ken because he has never left Malibu and he is a nervous traveler and he wants to go and explore the world. And using him to show how simple it is to use Expedia and how Expedia has everything you need in one place was just a really easy hack for us to show to consumers that anyone can travel, anyone can book, anyone can use Expedia to go places.

24:10So we launched our new brand proposition, which is the one place you go to go places with Mattel and Ken in January of this year. And actually, the ad has already got 500 million views on YouTube. It's been such a success. And we were the most viewed ad in the Super Bowl weekend. And then off the back of that, we have a number of other compelling stories that are launching throughout actually last week and this week, which focus on different reasons to buy with Expedia. So look out on YouTube for those. and we've also launched a really cool AI generated platform which we're going to be using in more paid social and CTV formats which is called Bundle It All.

25:03So I encourage you to just have a look on YouTube on those too. So with Expedia we have the difference is we have sort of a plethora of products on Expedia. We have everything from cars to hotels to vacation rentals to attractions to insurance and so we need obviously a much bigger creative inventory to be able to explain all of those things and so we've got a lot going on with Expedia then on Verbo I don't know if people know this but Verbo is actually 30 years old this year so it's actually like the OG of vacation rentals. And it is a beautiful brand because most of the homes on Vrbo, they're all whole homes.

25:52So, you know, lots of people don't know that about Vrbo, but basically it's a place where you can get the best quality vacation rentals. And what we want to drive with Vrbo is it's surprise-free vacations. So one of the insights that we have is a lot of the time with vacation rentals, people show up and the property looks nothing like the pictures. Maybe the pictures were taken 10 years ago. I don't know. Maybe the, yeah, you don't know. Like it's just, it's not as clear as hotels with vacation rentals. And so one of the insights we had there is with Vrbo, where we have a very strict policy of onboarding hosts that are showing properties that are exactly what they look like.

26:40And if that doesn't happen, we have this wonderful product called VerboCare. And if something goes wrong, we'll basically move you to a better property at our cost. So what we wanted to get across in our new campaign that we launched this last month was it's literally the only drama you have with a Verbo is the drama that you invite. So think about, we've got some very funny stories in there like you're going away with friends and there's always that one friend who pretends to be a chef and maybe he's not a chef or there's you going away with your family and there's that one person that's an influencer and they're trying to take pictures of food and so we've got a lot of funny human stories talking about how the verbo is perfect and we want your holiday to be perfect and the only drama is the drama you invite so we've also got a lot going on with verbo so well 30 years old is crazy i did not know it was 30 years old um yeah they like the og before before the airbnb before everything else and i do do agree the airbnb experience i had to get off of airbnb because every single time i book it was not something i expected i had a hotels are probably one of the most reliable sources of that's the thing you you know, most of the time, and especially I think that's why a lot of customers also like to book hotel chains, because, you know, once you've stayed at one, you kind of know what you're going to get with the next one.

28:07So I think with vacation rentals, it's such an amazing property type because, and I think it really like started booming over COVID, right, when everyone was wanting to stay in vacation rentals. And it's such a wonderful property type, but just it's, it needs to be managed differently. And so I think we're very proud of the inventory we have on Verbo and the way that our hosts treat the guests. And so, yeah, we're trying to get across that if you know you Verbo, use Verbo. It's the best choice for surprise-free, drama-free vacations. One thing, so having three brands, how are you sharing insights between each brand and how are you, I know we asked this before, but how do you plan out the calendar so you're not having to, you have to get all these deadlines at the same time.

28:59So how are you managing this portfolio? Yes. Well, I mean, it has been a busy few months. I'm not going to lie. But where we're strong is each of the brands has a very clear geo framework, the markets in which they operate in, because a lot of the brands like hotels.com is very big internationally, not only in the US. So we have clarity on like where each brand plays. We have clarity in terms of what each brand strategy is. They have all also very different media strategies. And then I also have a very good team that is dedicated to specific brands. So it's not only me, my goodness, I have a wonderful team of people that obviously bring all of this amazing work to life.

29:50And they are dedicated in the different brand teams. And in terms of like the calendar, really the thing that drives when we launch things is key booking periods and when travelers are looking for specific inventory. So sometimes you just got to burn the midnight oil and get things out the door, you know. So that's just the way it is. and most of i mean all three of them probably have this the same moments of when people are pretty much but then i think that there's a lot of i mean obviously we're only talking about the campaign ads here but there's a lot of other things that go into it right there's um we have a significant performance marketing team we have an incredible crm team we do a lot of product um work on our owned and operated.

30:43We have organic social. So, you know, when we launch a campaign, it's not just a TV ad, it's really like a full suite of assets that are designed specifically to be channel native across the whole ecosystem of where this product is going to launch. I know you said a little bit that you're integrating AI into your products. I know Tesla.com has a chat bot feature and like a planner feature. But I want to know how you also empowering your team to use it internally for themselves and as a marketing team use AI and how it's in your workflows today. I just think it's such an exciting time. I'm not on the scary AI camp.

31:33I'm definitely in the exciting AI camp because I think that in our marketing team, we're really using AI to boost creativity while really helping us to transition processes. Like we enhance quality, we increase scale, we save time, we reduce costs. So there's so many great examples where we're using it. And I think the thing that I've been so proud of is so many people in my team are embracing things. And we have such a wonderful experimentation culture where, you know, we're experimenting with different creative tools all the time. And I just think it's super exciting and cool to see people getting so excited about the fact that they can do so many things now.

32:17It obviously doesn't negate the need to have such a great creative team. I think that there's, you know, I really feel like human in the loop is really important. And I think that now where we're going is you just have more ways to produce things. So whereas AI is sort of like just another avenue you can look at. And based on the brief, it may be that you film something in a traditional way. It may be that you use creators to bring your concept across. Or it may be that the AI is super good and we've got like amazing tools that we can use AI and scale and it's going to be a compelling piece of advertising.