Expedia is taking intern marketing mania to task with an entertaining ongoing marketing campaign that focuses on two actors portraying interns, who then answer questions submitted via social media.
Marketing is often the domain of the intern, as many companies populate marketing teams with the younger generation. The business case is that these interns come with the dual-pronged advantages of being cheap/free and of theoretically being knowledgeable about the latest trends.
The casting is fairly representative of a familiar intern situation: one hyper-committed intern (Jay) frustrated with a more disheveled and clearly disinterested colleague (Stuart). In fact, the casting is straight out of young-ish popular culture, as one deft tweet points out:
https://twitter.com/swandad/status/575749616567611393
See for yourself:
"What's so important about that wall? Are you hiding money in that wall?" Well played lazy intern. Of course nerdy intern would stash cash in the wall at the office!
The #ExediaInterns hashtag was promoted heavily by Expedia throughout the past 7 days, with the OTA purchasing Promoted Tweets throughout to ensure continual engagement with the campaign. The results were strong, logging just over 100k views in that same time period, as well as a fairly steady stream of #ExpediaInterns Twitter mentions.
The video content is purposefully short, making it ideal to share on other platforms — including television.
For those that are not entertained by the interns' witty banter and odd couple mismatch, here are the key points answered by the team:
For those actually interested in an Expedia internship, Glassdoor suggests the company pays quite nicely and Expedia offers these tips about securing a real, non-promotional internship. Let's just hope that the real-world applicants are a bit more engaged than our friend Stuart from above...