Cheeky but effective – Captain Obvious Steals the Show for Hotels.com

Props to Hotels.com for their recent advertising campaign which features a character played by Brandon Moynihan called ‘Captain Obvious‘, who as you may have guessed, says and does things that are, well…obvious. Just like hotels.com would be the obvious place on the internet to book your hotel room?

Here’s an early ad from a couple of years ago:

What’s great about this campaign is not the fact that it’s tongue-in-cheek, but that in more recent efforts, it plays well to the ad and content formats available on YouTube and Facebook too.

On YouTube, for example, the brand introduces the viewer to ‘Skippable’ ads…totally not what you’d think though. These ads literally have the characters ‘Skip’ when you press the button…watch below:

On Facebook, the Hotels.com ad overcomes the challenge of videos auto-playing silently on the platform by introducing subtitles that say “Ads autoplay silently on Facebook – which is good for you – because I don’t know how to play Piano” (If you unmute the video, it is painfully obvious that this claim is true…the subtitles then end with a 10% off booking offer).