Smart Draft
25hours hotels
Issue 35 | June 2015
Agency
Kolle Rebbe GmbH
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Stefan Wu¨bbe Executive Creative Director Rolf Leger Art Direction Martin Strobel Copywriter Alexander Michaelsen
Production Team
Production Manager Martin Lu¨he Agency Producer Alexander Schillinsky Account Manager Jan Vierig Film Production Cobblestone GmbH Sound Studio Funk GmbH
Date
April 2015
Background
25hours hotels were not like other hotel chains. Though more expensive than budget hotels, each had a unique theme and therefore a complete different look.
The challenges were how to attract a target audience that was not flush with money and which was hard to reach through conventional advertising channels.
Idea
The solution was to offer young people a genuinely wonderful experience: an entire evening with their friends completely undisturbed.
In 25hours hotels in Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna, between 6pm and 11pm drinkers were given a free beer in exchange for all the battery power of their smartphones.
Special de-chargers drained bar visitors' phones of all their power so now they could concentrate on the people they were with.
Results
Free beer and the Smart Draft campaign led to a 20% increase in the number of visitors to 25hours hotel bars. Hotel reservations increased by 8%. During the campaign, 1,280 smartphones were drained of power so that thousands of young people stopped looking at their mobiles and started talking to each other.
Our Thoughts
This is a recurring theme these days, that while technology has allowed us to communicate more effectively than ever before, we are losing the ability to actually communicate. Durex has had huge success with its ‘Turn off to turn on’ message (see pages 50-51). This is more radical, asking people to render their phones useless. My guess is while 1,280 people did go the whole hog, tens of thousands did not, could not, do it. Not that 25hours hotels would have minded. They had made the point, got a load of free PR and packed in a load more punters.