Nothing says "We love our hosts" like videos of a guest jumping on the bed

Nothing says "We love our hosts" like videos of a guest jumping on the bed

I just saw this today and was stunned: A commercial showing hosts leaving out an electric guitar for a family and the couple's child jumping up and down on the bed.

What Ad agency thought this was a good idea? And what unrealistic expectations is Airbnb setting for potential guests about what hosts will be providing and what guests are allowed to do in these homes? (note all the hosts who verify they can't get reimbursed for their broken furniture and beds).

And no - it's not cute when it's a minority kid doing it.

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/OGXN/airbnb-made-possible-by-hosts-song-2

Please oh please oh please show these things to hosts in a focus group first. Our jobs are hard enough as it is.

89 Replies 89

One day my daughter, who was working on a minor in marketing, was interning at a television studio. They were having trouble getting the content right so she suggested they take the material, under NDA,  to her university because her classmates were the target audience. The studio worked with the professor and the class revised the material and made suggestions to improve the television show. The students gained a real world experience and the studio came out with a better product.

Likewise, for years I participated as a mentor in MECA Challenge - Most Entrepreneurial City in America. A number of us, as volunteers, worked with different groups of people (corporate staff, teachers, and occasionally students depending on the month), to create a marketing solution for a real product pitched by a local company. Our solutions were then scored at the end of the day by the company and a team of experts.  I have only lost the challenge one time - when I allowed the wrong spokesperson to explain our concept. Otherwise it became a sort of joke about competing against my teams (all chosen at random before we arrived.)

The key was to realize how to employ the strengths of the team members, most of whom were meeting for the first time. But also to recognize when there is a flaw in the business model. In one example, MECA was held at the Federal Reserve Bank. The teams were composed of teachers K-12. The company being hosted that day pitched an educational product. I had no idea what the company was trying to explain so I asked my team of experienced educators, "You're the target audience. Would you buy that product?" The answer was "No. we don't know what that product is or does either." So I did the "Captain Kirk" scenario (Star Trek) where I gave them permission to redesign the product to something they would buy for the classroom and then create a marketing program for it.

Not a single other team thought to do that, even though all the mentors were business people with experience. So we won the challenge because the client was blown away that we pointed out the flaws and fixed them. At least one person on another team became angry because no one told the teams they could do that. I said "No one told you that you couldn't."

In another example, the issue was why young people don't stay long in KC after relocating. Our groups were composed of people in a Chamber of Commerce mentoring program. So i asked my team, "Why did you come to KC? What makes you want to leave? Use your own experience to design a product that would make KC more engaging for you." We won that challenge by a wide margin by designing a personal experience platform that paired newcomers with existing residents with similar interests and using gift certificates donated by local businesses to create friendship circles around people who moved here without any personal connections.

Airbnb doesn't know what it has. It doesn't. But the hosts, who are on the ground and actually meeting these guests (in some cases) do. We are your first and best focus group as are your more experienced guests. Not the absentee investors who, as Andrew brilliantly said, buy up homes in residential areas they don't live in and treat those homes and neighbors as ATM's - but the hands on hosts who hear the stories (good and bad), interact with the guests and live through the continued nightmarish customer service failures.

So - might seem simple - but Airbnb is the industry leader right now. It won't be if its emphasis is packing in as many unqualified bodies as possible and shoving them at hosts without excepting the liability of that. Or signing up hosts with no business (or cleaning) acumen, and those who don't care about anything but how much cash they can raise. You know - the ones with checkout at 11 and check-in at 11:30 who lie about following Covid-19 cleaning protocols because - as one particularly problematic absentee host in Atlanta put on a FB post "....We are all going to die sometime and I need the money...."

To quote the character "RIpley" (brilliantly played by Sigourney Weaver in the movie sequel "Aliens") in talking about the difference between the humans and the villains..." I don't know who is worse - you don't see them (expletive) each other over for a (expletive) percentage...."

I would like to see Airbnb stop fighting hosts over common sense approaches and go back to employing the more logical concepts that worked well more than a decade ago. Host and guests interacting before booking and more comprehensive vetting beyond "possibly still breathing and has a credit card and phone number that may or may not be valid.".

@Christine615  I had always seen the lack of including hosts in the decision making process of marketing, as regards Airbnb, to be a matter of arrogance and wielding total control.

 

But if I understand you here, you are saying that it is in large part due to these companies not actually realizing that the end users are the best source of information as to how to gear the marketing?

 

That's a level of stupidity I find flabbergasting. It seems so obvious to me that the target market is the ultimate resource to find out what will work and what won't.

@Sarah977  Yeah, me too.  But then when I see that even today, 70% of hosts only have one listing, it supports @Christine615  view that Airbnb does not understand its business.  "We" the little guys are actually the overwhelming majority of their housing stock, so if they understood their market then it would be the 1 & 2 listing properties that got the perks, special host friendly rules, etc. and not the boutique hotels and property management condos....prioritizing this 70% would also be a huge help in their PR war against regulation.  I guess its possible that their profits are coming from the other 30%.....but so so much of what they do is tone deaf, including failing at a lot of corporate management and crisis communication 101...not involving or consulting stakeholders, unilateral policy changes, never beta testing anything of importance, never doing host surveys [which is easy and cheap and would yield fantastic data for them], very disorganized and anemic grassroots/public affairs work.....  that I am coming around to agree that they're simply a very poorly managed company.

@Mark116  Despite their hiring for top positions of corporate bigwigs like the former Disney Corp. current head of hosting, I think poorly managed is a fair assessment. They are majorly cheaping out in their CS dept. and their tech dept, judging from all their ongoing tech glitches, when in fact CS and tech are the  public-facing entities that lead to thousands upon thousands of user complaints and websites like Airbnb Hell.

 

They don't appear to consider hosts and guests to be a symbiotic relationship where one could not exist without the other. Their real messaging is either directed at hosts, or at guests, but not both together.

 

They actually pit hosts against guests by their ridiculous review policies, suspending listings purely based on an unverified guest complaint, and allowing guests to get away with not compensating for the damages they cause.

 

Yet their PR rhetoric still puts forth that Airbnb is about connection, trust, building bridges, etc. 

I have to wonder if they truly are so self-deluded that they believe their own rhetoric, or if they know perfectly well that they are promoting a huge lie.

 

Is Brian Chesky even aware that his CS reps suspend listings, telling hosts they did something wrong while refusing to tell the host what they supposedly did wrong?

I would like to think he doesn't- that it is simply a case of poor management and lack of connection between the VIPs in their corporate boardroom, and what is actually happening on the user level, because the alternative would lead me to consider that he is simply an evil person to whom money is the only thing that matters.

 

 

 

Exactly... suspending accounts without the host knowing what exactly the guest is reporting... losing bookings and also making the other guests crazy about how to find a new booking on the go.. when they booked with long anticipation ITS Crazy!

Their “investigation teams” are a complete joke...with cero common sense.. and lack of American Costumer Service Standards... 

I think your math might be mistaken... 70% of hosts might only have one listing.
But many hosts have... dozens or hundreds of listings.
So the fact that 70% of hosts have one listing, does not at all make them the majority of hosts on the platform.  Bringing in the money.  In fact they are the minority.

 

Here's an article that might explain what is going on at the top. Years ago I worked for a certain "card factory" that has been the biggest player in the industry and began to struggle against the rising tide of competition. They were slow to adopt to the newly emerging internet, and slow to realize their base of customers were aging but the children and grandchildren were growing up in a different environment with more communication options. Social expression and making connections was the company's currency, not the paper those sentiments were written on. People aren't good with words, but often enjoyed having help with that part - hence the card factory should have become social media long before MySpace. It's just that management didn't understand the new platforms and kept defaulting to cards and gift wrap as their mainstay. The existing management structure remained entrenched even as they sent us  middle managers to seminars to help "us" figure out what "we" were doing wrong in improving the company's bottom-line. I'm told even the family of the founders became frustrated with those leaders on high.

Which brings me to one of my favorite memories. I attended a Tom Peters session on the other end of the state. He was very specific about the "arrogance of the dominant player." That smaller upstarts could run rings around a legacy corporation because the existing corporation didn't think it had anything to learn. After all, it invented the game didn't it? Hence, more successful corporations understood their core product. Example: Honda makes engines and is good at it. It can be in a car, a motorcycle, a lawnmower - but the core of it is that engine. Airbnb makes social connections for travelers. It provides a connection to an external source that has a home away from home to rent. Understanding that "engine" and nurturing it will feed Airbnb's profits. That "engine" is the 70% of the hosts with 1-2 units (mostly 1 unit). That nurturing will cause other people to consider joining the platform as hosts: Community.

I still use it when having internal discussions about dysfunction within my own industry.

Enjoy.....C

https://tompeters.com/columns/arrogance/

Jean5812
Level 2
Brussels, Belgium

This ad says: go to an airbnb so you can let your kid stand on the coffee table and jump on the bed.  Basically, you don't have to care about other people's furniture if you're paying an airbnb host 90 dollars a night.


I agree with everyone this add sendt totally the wrong message!  

I get it that they want to offer experiences for kids, but it should be well behaved kids having fun in a normal way not standing on tables and destroying the bed.

Branka-and-Silvia0
Level 10
Zagreb, Croatia

well, after the dog on the white sheets and the kid on the table I expect the next ABB video of the guests jumping into the pool of the tree. Or of the roof. 

I would love to see an advertising campaign that promotes the community of hosts and guests as well draws some common ground as far as resepct and enjoyment inside bnb's. It appears like these kinds of ads simply attract the care free guests and bring in the idea that its okay to use someones property like it's their own! 

Brian2036
Level 10
Arkansas, United States

@Christine615 @Cheryi0 @Sarah977 @Suzanne302 @Ita5370 

 

I think the subliminal message is: “Rent someone else’s home so your kids can do all the bratty things you don’t allow at your house! Really! Don’t worry about the damages, you’re not expected to pay!”

 

To make it just a little better, they could wrap it up with the kid falling off the table, scraping his knee, and the parents getting a full refund for a safety violation. 

Exactly. Guest sues because the listing has no “do not jump on my bed” warnings and host listing is suspended. I can see it coming.😏

Fred13
Level 10
Placencia, Belize

Just stumbled on this thread; I got more of a kick out of your comments than the Airbnb ad. 

 

The  kid reminded me of 'Jeffrey' (Bill Cosby stint), where he kept everyone awake during a long flight and he finally fell asleep only when almost landing; then everyone took great pleasure waking him up as they were leaving the plane - to get even.

@Fred13  For some reason, I never want to see "Bill Cosby" and "asleep" in the same sentence again. Ever. 

No kidding, what a difference a few years makes.