VISIT A NORMAL HOTEL.
A themed hotel 2 hours from the Grand Canyon wanted more visitors but had a limited marketing budget. We gave them an unsettling ARG that put their name on the map for people all over the United States.
*THIS IS A SPECULATIVE CAMPAIGN
DEVELOPMENT
Think about all the hotels you’ve stayed in. Childhood visits, vacations, business trips: reflect on what made each location unique.
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If you’re anything like us, you won’t be able to, aside from that one really exciting destination inn from that one really exciting vacation. Everything blends together because every hotel is the same - a faceless network of lookalike chains with credit cards, rewards programs, & sanitized copy. There’s something unsettling about that, but you can’t quite put your finger on why.
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We leaned into that uncanniness for Moonflower Mansion, a standalone, intricately-themed hotel in Flagstaff, AZ. Using a smaller marketing budget, we set to make a name that would win over local residents & international Grand Canyon sightseers. So we made an ARG.
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Moonflower Mansion gets supplies from shops around the Phoenix metropolitan area, from record collectives to gemstone stores. We used those business ties to exhibit 6 unique indoor pop-ups, using a wireframe-backed poster, some props, & a lot of brochures. Along with a few physical billboards, all roads pointed back to “averagenormalhotel.com”.
Rough sketch of the "Average Normal Hotel" campaign's visual design.
Average Normal Hotel is exactly what it sounds like. They have a pool. They offer free parking. They can’t wait to see you again. Basic copy took on a sinister twinge, &, as users dove deeper into the Average Normal Hotel website, they found themselves at a hidden computer terminal with 6 codes to enter, each tying back to the 6 indoor pop-ups. Out-of-state folks played along by finding these 6 codes on the collaborators’ websites.
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While the ARG reward was a Moonflower Mansion promotional video, the ultimate goal of the campaign was to hijack part of the internet through user-generated TikToks, YouTube theory videos & dedicated Discord servers. People might not drop everything to book their vacation, but that gnawing question, whether or not an average, normal hotel is worth it, has been sown.
MESSAGING
VISIT A NORMAL HOTEL: For the perfect trip, vacationers want a hotel as memorable as the destination. This campaign uses uncanny visuals & terse, simple sentences to satirize hotel chains as a faceless, nameless entity, championing Moonflower Mansion instead as a beacon of intricate-theming & environmental storytelling that you have to see to believe.
ASSETS
In order to craft an unsettling hotel website, we needed to start with typefaces as inoffensive as those nationwide chains. Enter Josefin Sans & Nimbus Sans: readable, bland, &, quite literally, lacking an edge.
Red was our first color, a deep yet vibrant red that bleeds strip mall signage. NAILS. DONUTS. BARBER. The purple of night was next, followed by a dull computer green inspired by the first wave of communal university computers.
The only icon, a smiling man, is only unnerving under the right context. This is the right context. Its mask-like face, lack of eyebrows, & vague features make reading its true emotions difficult: the perfect mascot for an average, normal hotel.
Our background images similarly play on the uncanny nature of home-brewed 90’s CGI, with geometric environments & surreal lighting that show a slightly-warped version of our reality.
There aren’t any other icons to speak of.
CHANNELS
OUTDOOR (BILLBOARD)
PRINT (BROCHURE)
EVENT (POP-UP)
WEBSITE
VIDEO
TRANSCRIPT:
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It appeared one day, on the top of a hill, cresting from a sea of ponderosa as if to claim the wilderness itself. At night, it glows like a roman candle, its guests the gunpowder, their words the wick.
No one knows who built it, but rumors hang heavy over the town below. They say there are tunnels underneath the grand hotel. That something’s hidden there, something positively extraordinary.
You’ve played the story long enough. Come & live the ending. Because Moonflower Mansion isn’t your average, normal hotel: it’s something you’ve never seen before, & something you may never see again.
Book your next vacation at moonflowermansion.com. Only in Flagstaff, Arizona: two hours from the Grand Canyon.”
RESULTS
The following results only include data from the three-month run of the campaign.
191,234 pamphlets were taken. The pop-up QR codes were scanned 322,524 times.
User-generated content on Reddit forums totaled 169,000 upvotes. The top 20 YouTube videos on Moonflower Mansion / Average Normal Hotel totaled 43,952,324 views. Organic search Moonflower Mansion website traffic increased by 86%, with 48% of total traffic coming from non-affiliated social links (compared to 0% pre-campaign).
Total bookings increased by 68%, with 64% of the total booking cohort who completed the post-booking questionnaire listing “online game” as how they heard about Moonflower Mansion. 69% of bookings came from people within Arizona. 35% of bookings came from people out of state.
