Creative Director's Cut: Hilton’s 10 Minute Stay
I have lost hours, nay, days, to TikTok, a platform which is slowly gifting me the attention span of a small child.
So, when I heard someone had managed to get a 10-minute – yes a 10-MINUTE – TikTok approved by the big bosses at Hilton, my attention was most definitely ‘got’.
Branded TikToks are special beasts, aren’t they? At best, perfectly serviceable; at worst, deeply cringeworthy.
The 10-Minute Stay, however, achieves the seemingly impossible: long-form content from a brand that you’ll actually want to watch.
If you can fight your scroll reflex and watch all the way to the end, you could be in with a chance of earning rewards to redeem at your choice of Hilton Group hotels.
The activation is part of the chain’s latest campaign ‘It Matters Where You Stay’. I wasn’t in the room for any of the strategy meetings, but I assume it was created amidst tightening consumer purse strings to challenge the notion that hotels are simply a place to rest your head when you travel.
@hilton Unexpected & amazing things can happen when you stay, and we want you to stay with us for 10 minutes. Yup, we made a 10-minute TikTok AND we’re giving away 10M Hilton Honors Points + more. #HiltonStayFor10#HiltonForTheStay♬ Hilton’s 10-Minute Stay - Hilton
The works deserves a shout out for a few reasons.
As creatives, we spend so much time celebrating big, multi-channel campaigns that we forget to recognise brilliant platform-specific activations.
This is a simple yet culturally relevant way to land Hilton’s brand platform with a younger audience.
It’s a great example of trusting content creators and their unique creative process, instead of force-feeding key messages and micromanaging scripting. The results are genuinely very funny and, at times, meta.
The tone throughout is pitch-perfect; they understand what kind of content flies on TikTok and avoid seeming like a dad at the disco.
Well done, Hilton, sadly, despite staying for the full 10 minutes my attention span is…
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