Find Your Understanding

FIND YOURS

The Find Yours campaign articulates, in a variety of ways, the human truth that travel is both personal and transformational.

Find Your Understanding, is proof that advertising, when done right, can truly have a lasting positive impact on the world.

Expedia revolutionized the travel industry and created an entirely new category as the first-ever Online Travel Agency. For Expedia to successfully maintain its leadership position they needed to take the conversation beyond the transaction of booking and harness the emotional power of travel to connect with people on a genuine human level and demonstrate to its customers, employees and partners that Expedia truly understands travelers – not only where and how they like to travel, but why.

Find Your Understanding, follows a father’s journey, both literal and figurative, as he confronts his conflicting emotions about his daughter’s marriage to a woman on his trip to her wedding.

The film first ran online in October 2012 and hit a time when cultural conversation around marriage equality was in a crescendo. The CEO of Expedia used this film as the catalyst to publicly support Referendum 74 for marriage equality, airing the three-minute piece on key influencer TV networks when the politically charged decision for same-sex marriage went to the US Supreme Court and was passed.

Through the Find Yours Campaign, Expedia transcended the Travel category and distinguished itself on a broader stage as a modern, relevant brand with true character, brave enough to take a stand by accelerating the momentum of this once- fringe issue and helping it attain not only legality but also social legitimacy.

Our campaign was extremely successful in generating buzz and earned media. The campaign garnered over 1.796 billion media impressions, over 26,086,244 total impressions on Facebook and over 4.2 million impressions on Twitter.

Find Your Understanding generated thousands of news stories across the country and was recognized by the influential TED Talks who named it one of the top “Ads Worth Spreading” that year, exemplifying the importance for corporations to stand up for their customers and the greater good of society.

As a direct result of the campaign, Expedia was recognized as one of the best places to work in Seattle and one of LinkedIn’s 20 Most Desired Employers, the brand purpose to make travel personal was adopted across departments and as a result the company made a very significant investment in technology that would make the consumer experience more personal and Expedia preserved its market leadership position and raised levels of YOY brand awareness and top of mind.

But of all the positive effects of the campaign, one of the best was unintended. The couple featured in Find Your Understanding was able to adopt their son in California – in part because of our film. When they shared the spot with the social worker who questioned their family’s support, she was so moved she proclaimed her job done and approved the adoption.

One Show (Bronze)
TED Talks Ads Worth Watching