Social campaign
Bumble's brand was built around women making the first move. So it's only natural that they would sponsor some of the most inspirational women making high-profile moves — superstar NCAA athletes. We gave a $100K NIL grant to a select group of sportswomen to support them through the next steps of their career, and announced the partnership through social channels with a bold and modern twist on player cards.
Designing Airbnb News was a monumental effort on both the front and the back end. The site’s core audience was press seeking the latest updates, images, and quotes, but we still wanted our content to broadly appeal to the general public. Our resulting home page presented stories in a compelling way for both audiences. We published branded content that appealed to everyday users (like the top 10 travel destinations for the upcoming year) with functionality streamlined for journalists (like sorting stories by category or linking a full press kit package at the end of each article).
Building the back end was equally challenging. We developed and operated the site fully from Wordpress, but our primary user base were PR folks with minimal design or development experience. To ensure a consistent, high-quality aesthetic, we built a variety of story templates that gave our team the freedom to plug in content like photos, videos, slideshows, or even interactive infographics, without lifting a finger to design layouts.
Growing Airbnb News also meant expanding our horizons with our content. We of course published news on product releases and company announcements, but we also wrote travel trend pieces based on company data, gathered knowledge from the Airbnb community on how to elevate hospitality, and launched once-in-a-lifetime experiences like an overnight stay in the Louvre or a hangout at Scottie Pippen’s house.
Always cognizant that journalists were our primary audience, we designed our secondary pages to make the most important info easily accessible, like the company’s booking data or a page solely dedicated to company-approved media assets.
Airbnb News proved to be such a triumph for our global PR team that we translated the site into 16 additional regions/languages to better serve our offices around the world. Each regional Airbnb News site now runs independently with their own dedicated newsroom team who creates content tailored to their local markets.