Airbnb killed performance marketing and lived to tell the tale
In 2022 Airbnb cut most of its Google Ads spend and moved to brand. Revenue went up. Here's the strategy every founder should read.
Brand New Money Editorial27 June 20261 min readAirbnb
Brian Chesky said the quiet part out loud on an earnings call in 2022: Airbnb had shifted the majority of its marketing from performance to brand — and traffic held. Direct and unpaid traffic became 90% of the business.
The bet was simple. If your brand is famous enough that people type your name into the URL bar, you don't need to bid on it in Google Ads. If your product is talked about at dinner tables, you don't need to retarget it on Instagram.
This is not advice for a Series A startup. But it is a north star. Every brand should be building toward the day the search box says its name.
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Producer’s Take
What we’d tell you.
Performance marketing is a rental. Brand is a purchase. Most young brands over-invest in the rental because it's measurable, and under-invest in the purchase because it's not.
The single most valuable thing you can do this year is make one piece of brand work so specific, so beautiful, so unmistakable, that a customer describes it accurately to a friend at a dinner. That is your only real analytics.
