The Customer

Agoda, a Booking.com company, is the leading online travel agency in the Asia-Pacific region. Agoda is the go-to platform for travelers seeking diverse accommodation options across the globe.

Industry: Online Travel

Website: https://www.agoda.com/

Actor: Ayushman Khurana, a famous Bollywood actor

The Campaign

"Explore like a local" - Agoda's campaign featured Bollywood star Ayushman Khurana, who invited travelers to discover new destinations through personalized recommendations and experiences. The campaign aimed to showcase the variety of choices available on the Agoda platform.

Variables: @destination, sightseeing, specifications: beaches, mountains, and destinations)

Challenge

The goal was to increase brand awareness for Agoda across 250 destinations, highlighting the app's ability to provide personalized travel experiences, and drive more bookings.

Solution

Create dynamic and personalized pre-roll ads for YouTube, featuring AI-powered visuals and voice cloning, to showcase the diverse offerings of Agoda.

Key Results

• 🌐 100M+ Impressions: The campaign reached a vast audience, with over 100 million impressions.
• 📱 10M+ Views: The ads were viewed more than 10 million times, engaging a significant number of potential travelers.
• ⬆️ 2.5X Awareness Lift: The personalized and dynamic nature of the ads resulted in a 2.5 times higher awareness lift, effectively capturing the attention of the target audience.

Features Used

• Dynamic Visuals: Personalized visuals showcasing different destination options, in the background of the ad.
• Static Text Personalization: Subtitle text personalized to match every unique destination.
• AI Voice Cloning & Lip Sync: Ayushman Khurana's voice was cloned and personalized to speak about unique destinations, providing appropriate descriptions of the locale. This was seamlessly integrated with lip-syncing.

Delivery Channel

YouTube pre-roll ads were the primary delivery channel, allowing Agoda to reach a wide audience across multiple devices. These pre-roll ads were highly relevant, as the ad copy dynamically changed based on the video the person was watching. For example, if someone was watching a video about Paris, the ad would feature Ayushmann mentioning Paris, and the video graphics would change to reflect Parisian scenes.

The results: feedback from the client

“This new AI campaign by Agoda was an attempt to take personalization at scale to next level using AI with not only speech generation and lip syncing technology but image personalization technology of Gan.AI; and the output was nothing short of the expectation.

It’s very important in any campaign to connect with audience at personal level and at the right moment and in this campaign, this could have been achieved by super-personalized 200+ videos with an added complexity of celeb’s face in it.

Gan.AI’s technology not only helped achieving the best possible output at scale but also with quick turnaround time. This campaign has set a benchmark for not only OTA category but also across categories in how to best leverage AI to the max!”

- Sahil Sharma, Brand Lead @ Agoda (India market)

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