Expedia Let IShowSpeed Do His Thing and Put the Itinerary on Its Own Site
Expedia gave IShowSpeed room to make the content his way, then put the activities and booking details on a site built for interested viewers.
IShowSpeed took a bright-yellow Expedia mannequin for a massage and on a jet boat. People could book both activities on speed.expedia.com. The weird visual got to stay weird.
The mannequin road trip was the second phase of Expedia’s year-long partnership with Speed. Months earlier, he had spent 15 hours livestreaming across several Caribbean countries.
Jasmine Enberg and Kaya Yurieff reported for Scalable that Expedia says the stream reached more than 400 million people. Searches on Expedia rose 70% for Sint Maarten in the following days. Guadeloupe went up 50%, and Dominica rose 35%.
Expedia cannot say how many of those searches became bookings. It can say that people watched Speed visit those islands and started looking them up.
“We let him do his thing”
Expedia Group Chief Communications Officer Lauri Metrose discussed the partnership on Scalable’s podcast episode Inside Two OG Internet Brand Comebacks: Yahoo and Expedia Bet Big on Creators.
Expedia knew a live broadcast with Speed could go sideways. Metrose described the creative direction in six words: “We let him do his thing.” She also called bookings “the gravy” for a creator partnership at his scale. Reach and cultural attention were already valuable to the company.
Expedia’s choice gave Speed a clear role. He could travel at his usual pace and react to each place in real time. Expedia kept the practical travel information on the part of the campaign it controlled.
For a brief, I want the business objective and the details the brand needs the audience to remember. Those details tell me what has to survive the edit. I can make the story fit my feed and audience.
Put the itinerary where people can use it
The custom site listed every activity from Speed’s trip. A viewer interested in the massage or jet-boat ride could move from the video to the exact experience instead of trying to reconstruct the day from a caption.
Scalable reports that Expedia is developing a third phase that will bring livestreaming and booking closer together. The company can change its booking pages and calls to action as it learns which parts of the content send people searching.
I have written before about putting production and booking attribution into a travel creator’s scope. The Speed partnership puts the activity pages and booking measurement on Expedia’s side of the campaign. The creator can concentrate on the reason someone would care about the trip.
My work is short-form content, usually an Instagram Reel, so I have less than a minute to make a place feel specific. I might build the story around one experience or a funny observation from the day. The brief should tell me which destination or activity the campaign needs people to remember and where the brand can send them afterward. Someone who wants the trip can find the itinerary after watching, rather than listening to me recite it in the Reel.