The Challenge

Like many luxury brands today, The Dorchester Collection is endeavoring to reach a younger audience without alienating their current customer base. Specifically, they are interested in leveraging the marketing and PR initiatives in which they are already engaged in order to reach this broader audience.

The Dorchester Collection, in conjunction with their PR agency, Hawkins International Public Relations, knew that the most effective path to their goals was online. Lacking the knowledge and experience to properly amplify their efforts online, Hawkins PR and Dorchester Collection tapped Pandemic Labs to help strategize and execute a new media component to their traditional PR.

The Solution

The Dorchester Collection was holding an event at the Palace Hotel in New York City that would bring together the head Bar Managers from each of Dorchester Collection’s seven hotels. For one evening, in one room, these world-class bartenders would make their signature cocktails for the press and special invitees.

Pandemic Labs saw this as a perfect opportunity to create interesting, lasting content for the web. Prior to the event, Pandemic Labs held a video shoot with each bartender sharing the secrets to preparing his signature drinks. Coupled with interviews and footage from the event itself, this “how-to” footage was put together in 16 high-definition videos simultaneously expressing the history, luxury, and modernity of the Dorchester Collection hotels.

Pandemic Labs then seeded each of the videos onto branded Dorchester Collection channels on YouTube, Metacafe, and Dailymotion. The seeding strategy (location, titles, keywords, etc) was developed in concert with the SEO director for the Dorchester Collection so that the videos would provide the maximum SEO benefit for each hotel.

The Results

After only 30 days online the videos and channels had achieved a total of over 22,000 views. In addition to the direct views on the three video sites, Pandemic Labs’ digital PR efforts garnered nearly a dozen targeted online mentions on sites with a total of over 75,000 unique visitors per month.

The videos were of such high quality that the Dorchester Collection created an entire section of their website around the new Signature Cocktail Menu where the videos were featured prominently on each page. The site can be visited here.