Company: Holiday Inn Hotels and Resorts
Timeframe: August 2003 - October 2004
Budget: $438,000
The connection between laundry larceny and marketing magic may not seem obvious, but Holiday Inn Hotels and Resorts managed to score considerable communications mileage
(and earn a 2005 PR News Platinum PR Award) with an act of unlikely benevolence: absolving the world for a half-century of stolen towels.
"We really wanted to harness the brand's rich history and use that to reconnect with the American consumer," said Virginia Osborne, senior PR manager. "Not many brands really
have an emotional connection with their consumers, and we felt Holiday Inn ought to try to harness that connection."
Indeed, the hotel chain's research determined that 93% of Americans have stayed at a Holiday Inn. And one didn't need in-depth research to confirm more than a few of these
Holiday Inn guests checked out with the celebrated green-striped towel. Rather than getting angry at being the target of widescale towel theft, Holiday Inn decided to use matter-
of-fact miscreancy for a tongue-in-cheek brand of absolution.
The PR teams at Holiday Inn and Resorts and GCI Group decided to kick off the campaign by declaring August 28, 2003 as Towel Amnesty Day. A Web site was launched (http://www.holiday-inn.com/towels), which invited people to confess their sins and share the stories of why the Holiday Inn
towels were taken, how they were used, and what became of them. For every story collected, Holiday Inn would donate $1 to Give Kids The World, a charity that provides
vacations for terminally ill children and their families. The charitable choice was a natural fit: Give Kids The World was founded by long-time Holiday Inn franchisee Henry
Landwirth.
To give substance to the theme of amnesty, the PR team produced a book of personal stories contributed by past guests via the Web site. There was no shortage of stories to
choose from: More than 2,500 tales of towel theft were posted online. Those stories then became the basis for a commemorative book called About the Towels, We Forgive You:
Absorbing Tales of Borrowed Towels.
The book captures a wide spectrum of the human (and, occasionally, animal) experience, with the Holiday Inn towels turning up in an extraordinary number of unlikely
circumstances, including:
- A thoroughbred trainer who claimed Holiday Inn towels were the best for rubbing down his equine athlete's legs
- A woman traveling with her cat who used the towels as maternity supplies when the cat unexpectedly delivered kittens
- A child playing the Little Drummer Boy in a school pageant who wore a towel as a headdress (complete with the distinctive Holiday Inn logo showing - perhaps there was room at
that inn?) - A sequestered juror who envisioned doing his own perp walk when the court bailiff - accompanied by a stern police officer - abruptly announced a baggage search for stolen
towels (the bailiff was kidding and the juror got away with his "crime"). - A gallant man who offered a towel to a rain-soaked distressed damsel - his kindness led to conversation, then more conversation, and now they are married.
"It pulls at the heartstrings of everybody who's ever taken one of those towels," adds Osborne, who notes that sometimes a Holiday Inn object other than a towel was carried
off: Bathmats are popular prizes, and one person reported discovering a Holiday Inn flag in his parents' possession.
About the Towels, We Forgive You: Absorbing Tales of Borrowed Towels was unveiled on October 19, 2004 at the Chicago annual investors' conference of InterContinental
Hotels Group, Holiday Inn's parent company. The day earlier, Holiday Inn distributed a VNR and ANR to broadcast stations nationwide. Chicago morning shows were sent
information on the book, and a local woman with a story in the book was made available to create a local angle for the story. For the Chicago TV placements, Holiday Inn arranged
for Peter Greenberg (the NBC "Today Show" travel editor who wrote the book's forward) to be available for in-studio interviews; Greenberg was also present at a book signing
during the launch event.
The investors' conference proved an ideal venue for the launch, since many members of the hotel trade press and financial media were in attendance.
About the Towels, We Forgive You: Absorbing Tales of Borrowed Towels was given a retail price of $25 and was sold directly from the Holiday Inn Web site. The company
determined that all proceeds from the book sales would go to Give Kids The World. This initially was decided to ensure 100% of profits went to the charity, but by June 2005 it
was listed for sale on Amazon.com. The book is also available for sale at individual Holiday Inn locations and it also been used as part of Holiday Inn's PR materials for
later promotions and campaigns.
Bottom line: 850 media placements including mentions of the book in 25% of the top 50 DMA newspapers in the country. Holiday Inn produced and distributed a VNR/B-roll
package that garnered 208 media placements. A total 1,869,691 TV media impressions were harvested. From the online world, the towel-oriented Web site drew some 350,000 hits.
That's already a win, but the PR team takes it a step further with a creative bit of accounting: If each of those 350,000 web visitors would to book a single hotel night, they
say, it could generate nearly $25 million in revenues. And the book-based fundraising for Give Kids The World raised $10,000.
The cost: A total budget of $438,000 (which included the publication of the book, production of towels and merchandise for the franchises); the media portion of the campaign
alone was $116,500.
Now, if only they'd bring back the towels.
Contact: Virginia Osborne, 770.604.2037, [email protected]