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Airbnb

'The moment we saw the campaign… we took it down,' AirBnB CEO on those OOH tax ads

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By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

December 2, 2015 | 3 min read

The chief executive of AirBnB has laid into an ill-received (and quickly axed) ad campaign its agency of record ran in San Francisco urging the public to appreciate its tax contributions to the city.

The outdoor ads, created by TBWA\Chiat\Day L.A., were erected throughout the city in the lead up to the Proposition F, a vote which could have seriously hindered AirBnb's business by restricting how many days hosts can let out their properties for.

Ultimately, after a sizeable investment of $8m, in a campaign spanning everything from OOH placement to door-to-door canvasing, the proposition did not pass.

In October, however, the company was heavily criticised for a series of ads from the campaign that suggested the public should be thankful for Airbnb's $12m hotel taxes contribution.

Speaking to Re/Code on a dedicated podcast, Chesky held no punches in critiquing the work: "It was very ill-advised…there’s this notion that we aren’t paying our fair share of taxes."

This sparked the AOR brainstorming "a billboard campaign to say we pay taxes, which doesn’t even sound like a good idea when you say it out loud, and yet they did it".

“Somebody at an agency proofed this ad, one person in our company saw it. Very few people saw it. There was a lot of outrage…how could we have approved it? The problem was, we were moving so fast that we didn’t see it.

He concluded: “The moment we saw the campaign…we took it down immediately. We were really embarrassed internally, so that was a problem. It seemed like it was related [to the Prop F fight] and it was the worst of all possible coincidences. It made us look like jerks, and we’re not jerks.”

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