Elegant Hotels

CHALLENGE

Elegant Hotel Group tasked The M Network with creating a branded ad for a publication put out by American Society of Travel Agents for their annual meeting. The goal of the ad was to create something that would impress upon U.S. based travel agents attending the conference that the Elegant Hotel Group is a high-touch, highly unique collection of resorts for clients interested in bespoke luxury destinations.

To do this, though, we faced a very interesting problem. You see, we had awesome photography from each of the resort properties.

We had created a very tight style guide for the client

We even had very specific direction from the client.

Our problem was that this was not a direct to consumer ad. The travel agents who would be seeing our ad, see this stuff all the time. In fact, we were fairly confident that the travel agents who would be seeing this ad would actually see similar ads with similar visuals and similar messaging by page three of the publication.

APPROACH

Instead of creating an ad that would look like everything else in that publication, The M Network team petitioned our client to let us take a creative “flier.” We wanted to produce an original piece of artwork that would tell the story of luxury and high-end customer service while, at the same time, looking completely different from everything the other ad agencies for luxury resorts would be creating.

One of the cardinal rules in travel advertising is “let the destination sell itself.” This requires showing lots of beauty shots. Yet, here we were, going to our travel client, telling them we wanted to create an ad that didn’t use any visuals from the actual property

THE OUTCOME

Here’s the ad we created

Ultimately, the client contact reported back to us that travel agents were specifically mentioning the ad back to her in conversation, allowing for deeper conversations and establishing new contacts.

M NETWORK CAPABILITIES DEPLOYED

Branding
Strategy
Messaging
Visual Design
Media Placement