Hotel Indigo El Paso: The Fifth story

L = Executive Creative Director

PROJECT BACKGROUND

El Paso's downtown was experiencing a vibrant revitalization. Many stylish and trendy bars, restaurants and hotels were opening and drawing crowds to the neighborhood. As competition grew more plentiful, Hotel Indigo El Paso desired to retain its status as "the place" for locals to hang out socially and for out-of-towners to stay while visiting this unique border city.

THE RESEARCH + INSPIRATION

The hotel owners had exquisitely integrated art, design, music, food and personal touches that were highly authentic to El Paso, yet so elevated many locals didn't even recognize the source of the inspiration. This set them apart from other hotels and trendy hangouts at that time. We saw that to continue growing audience attention, Hotel Indigo El Paso needed to be firmly established as the authority on El Paso culture.

We also understood that visitors tend to gravitate to the places locals go, especially if those establishments offer an experience that's authentic to the city they're visiting. If Hotel Indigo El Paso could maintain and grow its local audience by spotlighting its cultural authority, the out of town audience would continue to follow.

Inspired by this knowledge, the campaign slogan "The New Authentic El Paso" was dreamed up. It became our north star for content creation that would celebrate what was unique about our city and Hotel Indigo's curated, modern aesthetic homage to that.

CONTENT CREATION

We named the content home “The Fifth Story” — a reference to the fifth floor of the hotel where travelers checked in and out. It’s also where the hotel bar, Circa 1963, was located. The fifth floor was truly the nucleus of the hotel where all the “stories” begin. All content was distributed via social media and email from thefifthstory.com.

VIDEO CONTENT

We launched this campaign with cocktail how-to videos that feature Circa 1963’s popular and talented mixologists. Each mixologist was asked to create their own unique cocktails inspired by local culture and ingredients. Since video production was out of the client’s budget, we decided to string together beautiful photography to tell the story behind the cocktails and show how to make them.

SOCIAL MEDIA Teaser VIDEOS

To drive our audience to the website content, we posted teaser videos on Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories and Twitter.

COCKTAIL MAKING EVENTS

These how-to videos were also brought to life as a series of events hosted at Circa 1963. There, participants enjoyed hands-on cocktail making lessons with the mixologists themselves. A deeper understanding of the inspiration behind each cocktail was divulged as well.

INFORMATIVE ARTICLES

We also created informative articles inspired by El Paso culture and events. Please view the videos and articles at thefifthstory.com