Ad Campaign of the Week: Hotwire No Pressure Zone Ad Makes Moderate Impact

Travel deals and booking site Hotwire recently released a set of video ads featuring Martin Starr of Silicon Valley entrenched in a surreal environment known as the “no pressure zone.” The idea is to call attention to the no-pressure attitude of using Hotwire for booking hotels, flights, rental cars and more. So how do consumers respond to this ad campaign? We asked 1,000 respondents about their travel booking habits and then tested the impact of this latest ad campaign.

Travel Booking

In Ask Your Target Market’s latest online survey, 26% of respondents said that they’ve traveled within the last month. And 30% have traveled in the past three months. Of those who travel at least on occasion, 30% said that they’ve used Hotwire to research or book travels. And 10% use Hotwire regularly. Travelocity and Expedia were the most popular sites for this purpose. But 38% of travelers also said that they don’t use any of the popular travel booking sites regularly.

Hotwire No Pressure Zone

Overall, 6% of travelers said they would be certain or practically certain about using Hotwire for their next vacation. And 17% said it would be very probable. Of those who viewed the Hotwire no pressure zone ad, 7% said they would be practically certain about choosing Hotwire. And 17% said it would be very probable. Additionally, 21% of respondents who viewed the ad said that they’ve watched the show Silicon Valley. Of those respondents, 12% said they would be practically certain about choosing Hotwire. And 24% said it would be very probable.

Brand Attributes

In general, travelers used words like easy, cheap, great and reliable to describe the Hotwire brand. Those who viewed the Hotwire no pressure zone ad were a bit more likely to use words like easy, reliable, modern, innovative and of course, no pressure.

Key Takeaways

The Hotwire no pressure zone ad didn’t make much of an impact on consumers as a whole. But with those who were most likely to recognize the actor and appreciate the humor of the ad, it made much more of an impact. This indicates that it could be most effective for the company to target the ads to consumers during Silicon Valley and similar programming. But it could also mean that utilizing other actors in the campaign and then targeting their ads to other types of programming might also be a strategy worth looking into. You can view the complete survey results in the widget below and be sure to click “Open Full Report” to take advantage of all the chart and filter options.Photo Credit: Martin Starr by Gage Skidmore under CC BY-SA 2.0What do you want to know? If you need some consumer insights on a particular topic, let us know in the comments below and we’ll consider it for an upcoming survey post.

Results were collected on September 27 via AYTM’s online survey panel.