Screen Magazine
09/07/2007
Amy Wilschke
What would you do for 10 years' worth of free vacations? For the kids involved in Hyatt Resorts' Ultimate Adventure Challenge, the answer to that question is pretty much anything. In a breakthrough campaign involving consumer-generated content and web interactivity, Hyatt has created the chance for kids and their families to win 50 free nights at any Hyatt Resort hotel worldwide - and the same prize will go to one lucky online voter, as well.
"Essentially, the campaign grew out of a desire on the part of Hyatt to find a way to integrate consumergenerated media into a campaign," explains Jim Forni, vice president and executive director of Curium Studios (Chicago, a division of Critical Mass, the digital agency of record for Hyatt) and the writer/director/executive producer on the Hyatt Ultimate Adventure Challenge campaign.
"That was one aspect of it. The other aspect was driven by a brand initiative, which was a consumer insight that Hyatt was perceived first and foremost as a strong luxury brand but [that it] also appealed to business travelers. What [Hyatt] wanted to do was shift that perception and celebrate the resorts as family destinations. So you have these two criteria that were functioning. How could they come together?"
Forni says the solution was to combine two of today's most successful media trends - the "American Idol" style reality contest and user-generated content such as YouTube. Also, since Hyatt wanted to appeal to families and try to attract families to its resorts, that had to be taken into consideration as well. "One of the things we found was in travel space - in traveltainment - families and children are not really what you see," he explains. "You see a lot of intrepid travellers on Discovery or Travel Channel, or couples on 'Survivor,' so this was a way to do that and exploit that space. This is a little bit about shifting Hyatt from a business hotel to a family resort juggernaut."
The contest works like this: families from all across the United States submitted audition tapes of their children - ages nine to 12 - participating in some adventurous activities on their own in their personal lives. Once the people at Critical Mass/Curium Studios had the chance to go through the tapes, they chose a group of semifinalists to fly to Chicago for a live audition. During those auditions, each family had about a half-hour to tackle a few questions posed by the panel of judges - made up of Hyatt executives and the Curium Studios crew. The questions were orchestrated to show how well the kids could think on their feet and improvise during various situations.
The judges finally decided on five families to complete the Ultimate Challenge, and the adventure was ready to begin. The resulting campaign is a series of six webisodes featuring the kids and their families competing in different adventure challenges in three of Hyatt's Resort locations - New Mexico, Lake Tahoe and Kauai.
Some of the adventures the families will be competing in include a hot air balloon target hunt, an outdoor skills biathlon and a tubing obstacle course. All of the activities featured in the campaign are available through Hyatt resorts. After watching each webisode, viewers are invited to vote for their favorite family in the hopes of winning 50 free nights at any Hyatt resort for themselves.
"It's been our biggest, most massive undertaking," Forni explains. "We started pitching the project in December [and] presenting it by January. We were in pre-production in March [and in] April [and] May we got the contestants. [In] June we picked the contestants and had the screening auditions. In July we did the production the first two weeks. We worked all through the July 4th holiday, through the middle of July, and the final episode took place in Kauaii so we had a day and a half travel on the way back. We've been in post since then."
The first episode aired the night of August 15. The rest of the webisodes are slated to air in five- to seven-day intervals culminating with a mid-September voting close and an announcement of the winner in late September.
"What Hyatt boldly did here was engage us to help create something that was a more compelling and immersive way to show those activities, involve you in a drama, involve you in these families, and now you have to pick one of these families and there is no second place," says Forni. "It's a bold move on Hyatt's part ... and we applaud them for doing that."
