How Booking.com creates 10,000+ video ads with Cube

About

Booking.com is one of the world’s leading digital travel companies with a mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. Founded in 1996, Booking.com is available in 43 languages and connects millions of travelers to experiences, transportation options and more than 28 million accommodation choices across the world.

Challenge

In a landscape where video marketing was becoming more personalized and data-driven, Booking.com saw the need to streamline the production of their video assets. Each campaign required hundreds of videos. And every one of them needed to be tailored and optimized for different types of customers across different markets and channels.

Their approach at the time wasn’t designed to handle this volume. Creative suppliers had to handcraft each asset one by one, making production slower, inflexible and prone to manual errors. Booking.com set out to overhaul their production pipeline, looking beyond the traditional approaches to scaling video output across the organization.

Before Cube, we had a really complex localization process. This meant that we were working with a lot of different partners and people to make sure that we could localize one asset into a specific market.

Solution

Why Cube

Among agencies, studios, and software tools offering solutions for large-scale production, Booking.com found Cube’s integrated creative automation approach to be the best fit. Because Cube is backed by its parent company Ambassadors, a creative production studio, it can offer Booking.com a full-service solution: templating technology and multidisciplinary creative expertise under one roof.

How it works

Template development

As before, the production team stores their documents, offline and online edits, and final deliverables in project folders. But instead of having them on the company server, they upload the files to their Cube workspace in the cloud. This allows for access anytime and anywhere, directly from the browser.

For any production that needs to be scaled up, Booking.com’s relevant marketing or communications team will request a template from their Cube project manager.

Depending on the project, Booking.com either tasks Ambassadors’ creative team with developing a concept or provides one created by their designers or agency. In either case, the Cube creative automation team helps scale-proof the concept by incorporating dynamic options for text, languages, voiceovers, embedded images and videos, screen sizes, UI animations, and more.

Once the concept is approved, template production begins. Cube’s developers and compositors recreate the concept down to the smallest detail in Cube’s templating engine. This allows Booking.com to achieve the desired creative quality without concessions – even for concepts that include advanced motion graphics or 3D animation. Meanwhile, Ambassadors takes care of the extra (post-)production work that’s needed, such as visual effects, voice-overs, sound and music.

Usage

Then when the template is ready, Booking.com can start generating videos from their Cube workspace. They can paste localized copy, select the formats needed and specify other parameters in a datasheet, creating hundreds of asset versions at once. And from there, they can push the videos directly to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. All within minutes, without risking going off-brand.

While the system is designed so Booking.com can use it without outside help, Cube’s creative automation team is always ready to lend a hand. From troubleshooting to managing asset delivery when things get busy.

With this setup, Booking.com can produce large batches of on-brand video assets as they need them. They can localize campaigns for other countries and touchpoints, while optimizing the creative for the best performance. At any time, over and over again.

Cube coming from Ambassadors as a production house means it’s not a tool that has been built purely to gain efficiency, but it's actually bringing two worlds together. It's quality first and then scalability. And that’s what makes the difference.

Outcome

Working closely with Cube and Ambassadors, Booking.com has multiplied the output and quality of its video advertising and communications efforts.

By making on-demand video creation available across the company, Booking.com has been able to ramp up production through automation. And by choosing a single partner for creative scaling instead of many, they have simplified the pipeline even more. The result: shorter turnaround times and greater brand alignment.

Booking.com can deploy agile tactics far more effectively than before. This lets them respond to changing needs and adjust the creative as they gain new insights. And with access to creative and production resources, Booking.com can also explore new creative angles to capture the attention of their audience.

With more than 10,000 targeted videos published, Cube has become a key part in Booking.com’s martech stack. Production, brand, communications and performance teams have leveraged this in their workflows and strategies.

For Booking.com, marketing success ultimately starts with serving the right content to the right person at the right time. Now that production efficiency is no longer an issue, Booking.com can focus on finding the best way to connect with every type of traveler – wherever they are, whatever journey they’re on.