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Booking.com Reframes Travel Wonder With Live Curious
Booking.com's Live Curious campaign is a 360-degree brand platform created by adam&eveDDB, launched in the United Kingdom on 23 February 2019, using six emotionally grounded travel films to reposition the brand from functional accommodation choice toward meaningful human experience, and distributed across television, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and digital display.
The campaign marks a decisive shift in how Booking.com addressed travellers across the United Kingdom and, subsequently, across wider European markets when the rollout extended in March 2019, as reported by News Booking. Where earlier Booking.com work leaned on product utility and celebrity association — the 2016 effort featuring former French footballer Thierry Henry, created by AnalogFolk, centred on finding ideal holiday accommodation — Live Curious trades functional reassurance for something less tangible and more durable: the emotional texture of being alive to the world. The July 2019 creative iteration, documented by adsoftheworld.com and Maartenvandaele Work, expanded the platform into six distinct brand films, each depicting a recognisable human travel moment — joy, wonder, freedom, determination — accompanied by 20-second and 15-second video cutdowns, social content, and radio in select European markets. The campaign contains four media assets in the archive record, with the July 2019 iteration representing the fullest articulation of the creative idea. The geographic anchor throughout is the United Kingdom, where the brand first committed the platform to public life and where the creative ambition of adam&eveDDB shaped how curiosity would be offered as a travel philosophy rather than a marketing slogan.
Booking.com entered the Live Curious era facing a structural challenge familiar to every dominant online travel agent: scale creates commoditisation. The campaign's strategic objective, as detailed by maartenvandaele.work and confirmed by news.booking.com, was to create meaningful emotional differentiation using ordinary human travel moments — not aspirational fantasy, but grounded, recognisable experiences that any curious person could locate in their own life. The move away from purely functional messaging was deliberate, representing a repositioning effort documented across multiple trade sources including campaignlive.co.uk.
The competitive context in the United Kingdom and across the global online travel market makes this ambition legible. According to businesstats.com and scribd.com, Booking Holdings — Booking.com's parent company — held approximately 67.7% market share in one cited OTA-market dataset, with gross sales of approximately $96.4 billion in 2019. Expedia Group held 12.8% in the same dataset and represented the most direct comparable competitor, while Airbnb was simultaneously disrupting the accommodation segment by anchoring its own brand identity in belonging and lived experience rather than transactional convenience. In that environment, a market leader defending share cannot simply outspend on product messaging; it must occupy territory that price-led competitors cannot easily replicate. Live Curious staked that territory in emotional resonance. The United Kingdom was the chosen proving ground, with the campaign described by The Drum's senior reporter Imogen Watson on 1 March 2019 as an "off the wall" execution featuring images including bubble accommodation, goats in a tree, and a giraffe licking a traveller's face — each image designed to activate genuine curiosity rather than manufactured aspiration.
Live Curious is directed by Fredrik Bond, a detail confirmed in the production record associated with the campaign and cited by maartenvandaele.work. Bond's involvement signals the creative register adam&eveDDB was aiming for: cinematic discipline applied to moments of human scale, where the grandeur is emotional rather than geographical. The six brand films do not sell destinations; they sell states of being. A traveller's face met by a giraffe's tongue. Goats balanced improbably in the branches of an argan tree. A bubble tent suspended in a landscape with no horizon. Each image is strange enough to arrest attention and familiar enough, in its human centre, to generate recognition.
Chief Creative Officer Richard Brim led the adam&eveDDB creative team, with Creative Director Laura Rogers shaping the executional detail alongside creatives Stevie Rowing-Parker and Emily Tolley. The campaign was characterised by Campaign publication on 1 July 2019 as evoking the wonder of travel through simple human moments — a description that captures the discipline of the creative approach: simplicity of premise, richness of feeling. Adweek AgencySpy noted on 6 March 2019 that Live Curious represented adam&eveDDB's first campaign for Booking.com, with the goats-in-a-tree image becoming a signature visual shorthand for the platform's sensibility. The production architecture is explicitly 360-degree in scope, as documented by news.booking.com: brand films, television and video cutdowns in 20-second and 15-second formats, social content optimised for Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, digital display, and radio in selected European markets. In the United Kingdom, where the campaign launched, the full weight of that distribution strategy was deployed to establish Live Curious not as a single advertisement but as an ongoing brand philosophy.
No verified performance data for Live Curious is publicly available in the sources reviewed for this analysis. No awarded metals from Cannes Lions, D&AD, or other industry bodies are attributed to the campaign in the public record, and no sales uplift or brand-tracking figures have been published by Booking.com or adam&eveDDB in a form that permits independent verification.
What can be assessed is the structural logic of the campaign's effectiveness case. Live Curious launched in the United Kingdom at a moment when Booking.com, per businesstats.com and scribd.com, held a dominant position in the OTA market by gross sales — a position that typically shifts competitive pressure from acquisition to retention and brand equity. A campaign designed, as maartenvandaele.work documents, to move the brand beyond functional messaging and toward emotional differentiation addresses exactly the right problem for a market leader. The choice of six discrete human moments rather than one monolithic brand story gives the platform both flexibility and frequency across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and digital display without creative exhaustion. The 20- and 15-second cutdowns, confirmed by adsoftheworld.com, serve paid social and pre-roll environments where attention is contested and brevity is a structural requirement. The deployment of radio in select European markets, as noted by news.booking.com, extends reach into audio environments where the platform's emotional register can be sustained without visual support. Clapboard scores Live Curious at 63 out of 100, reflecting a campaign with genuine creative ambition and disciplined production craft that nonetheless stops short of the formal recognition or documented business impact that would place it among the benchmark-defining work of its era.
Live Curious is a 360-degree brand campaign created by adam&eveDDB for Booking.com, launched in the United Kingdom on 23 February 2019. It uses six emotionally grounded travel films to reposition the brand around human curiosity rather than functional accommodation search, distributed across TV, social platforms, digital display, and radio.
adam&eveDDB created Live Curious for Booking.com. Chief Creative Officer Richard Brim led the team, with Creative Director Laura Rogers and creatives Stevie Rowing-Parker and Emily Tolley. Director Fredrik Bond helmed the brand films, as documented by maartenvandaele.work. The campaign launched in the United Kingdom in February 2019.
Live Curious launched in the United Kingdom on 23 February 2019, as reported by news.booking.com. A European rollout followed in March 2019. The July 2019 iteration expanded the platform into six brand films with additional social and digital content, representing the campaign's fullest creative expression across the United Kingdom and European markets.
Live Curious replaced functional, product-led messaging with emotional brand positioning. Booking.com's 2016 campaign, created by AnalogFolk and featuring footballer Thierry Henry, focused on accommodation choice. Live Curious, as documented by maartenvandaele.work, shifted emphasis toward human travel moments — wonder, joy, freedom — to create differentiation that competitors could not easily replicate on price alone.
Booking.com distributed Live Curious across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, digital display, and television, with radio used in select European markets, as confirmed by adsoftheworld.com and news.booking.com. The campaign included 20-second and 15-second video cutdowns alongside full-length brand films, giving the platform presence across both long-form and paid social environments in the United Kingdom.
Clapboard scores Live Curious at 63 out of 100. The score reflects genuine creative ambition, disciplined production craft under director Fredrik Bond, and a strategically coherent brand repositioning effort in the United Kingdom, balanced against the absence of publicly documented awards recognition or independently verified business performance data for the campaign.
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