ADdicted: The World is Meant to Meet

If you want to understand why I have mixed feelings about the ad below, stop it as soon as you see "The world is meant to meet" on screen (the 0:27 mark) and try to guess the company responsible for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rUqVnhU9tU

As someone watching this ad, I love the interesting facts presented.

I love the background music.

And most of all, I love the message of this ad: that great things happen when people from different cultures come together, a fact most evident every four years when the world comes together to watch "the beautiful game".

But as a marketer, I hate that I couldn't tell you this was an ad for Airbnb until the final two seconds of the spot, when the logo briefly flashed on the screen.

And I hate that if you had asked me to guess the advertiser, I could have easily come up with a half-dozen different airlines and hotel companies that could have swapped their logos with Airbnb's, and "owned" this ad just as credibly.

All my instincts tell me this spot is likely to prove ineffective: unlikely to be remembered as an Airbnb ad, unlikely to help Airbnb be top-of-mind when someone needs to book a place to stay while travelling, and thus unlikely to drive any incremental Airbnb bookings.

Marketing's ultimate job is to drive sales.

And despite how much I like this ad as a consumer, "The World is Meant to Meet" isn't distinctive or memorable enough to do that for Airbnb.