The spot, Cheap Commercial, positions Hotwire.com as the leader in cheap online travel sites. It has a very homemade feel, as if real people took these snapshots while traveling. These are not exotic, globe-spanning vacations. They are trips to see relatives or weekend getaways that bargain-hunting travelers can relate to.
Philosophy
If Hotwire.com is all about cheap, then the commercial production must follow suit. The spots were shot by agency creatives using consumer digital cameras. The people cast were agency people and their relatives. The music was created by a local garage band. It was all edited in-house. All this enabled us to maximize exposure by putting production dollars towards media. Not only that, but the rough, homemade quality of the spots made Hotwire.com stand out among all the slick, produced commercials on air today.
Problem
Hotwire.com currently competes with Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz in the crowded online travel category. We had to get our message of cheap travel out and boost brand recall with an advertising budget dwarfed by those competitors.
