Kayak.com a household name?

Check out the above Kayak.com ad submitted by Kayak CEO and co-founder Steve Hafner. The destination is Dallas, home of Travelocity and the image is Travelocity's CEO Michelle Peluso and the roaming gnome. Hmmm... could this be revenge for Michelle's "Skipper" comment at last year's PCW Executive Conference? (The Skipper moniker comes from the harsh Forbes.com article titled Struggling Upstream.) Kayak is certainly not struggling as of late. Since that article, they hired a top marketing executive (Dean Harris), raised another significant round of funding, and have now launched an innovative, and highly viral-worthy, ad campaign.

Brian Smith at VerticalSearch.net interviewed the Kayak.com marketing team, lead by Dean Harris, and asked about the new campaign . Some of the nuggets from the interview that I found interesting:

Brian: Why did you decide to commit to TV advertising?
Kellie: We’re all [the travel search engines] lagging behind the online travel agents (OTAs). How do we compete? We hired a CMO, and let him decide. It wasn’t that we wanted TV, it was that we wanted to be a household name.

Brian: Who is the campaign targeting?
Dean: Adults 25-54 who are self directed travelers. $60K+ in household income.

Brian: How will you measure success?
Dean: We’ll look at the number of users, look at search volume, look at how other factors are increased as a result of offline spending. Search results will get greater conversion.

Brian: Does a big flashy campaign just mean that we’re in another bubble?
Dean: I don’t think this campaign is big or flashy. And I think that we at Kayak think this is an important and necessary investment. I do believe advertising works and large brands have built their businesses on advertising. I don’t think we’re following a bubble as we’re spending efficiently and with impact. We do a lot of online marketing, and we have an enduring commitment to online. Search is very efficient way to reach people. But cost for online advertising has gone up dramatically. Because of the way we’re buying [the air time for the commercials], we can do this more efficiently offline as opposed to online.

Brian: The ads seem to have been created with an online viral strategy in mind?
Dean: You’ll see the ads on YouTube and MySpace. The ads will appear on affiliate sites as streaming videos. This was a contingency for the campaign. Shorter length videos tend to do better on the web. One of the reasons we did 15-seconds is that we knew it would translate better to web use.

Brian also has a post titled "My Take on Kayak Spending $10M". My very general, high-level take on the campaign is that it's hard to do much with $10M in online travel when you are up against the multi-$100 million budgets of the OTAs. At least Kayak, with their innovative approach, has the possibility of turning that $10M into $100M of value - if it really takes off virally. And, if that happens, perhaps it might have a chance at becoming a household name.

(Oh yeah, and Brian, thanks for the Farecast mention: "The creatives the Brooklyn Brothers did for Kayak look like they belong on Farecast (with it’s bright, welcoming colors), not Kayak.")