Wing It, YEAH!
Animation for Booking.com’s #WingItYeah summer campaign, turning fan-submitted vacation photos into personalized GIFs within hours.
Turning Vacation Photos Into GIFs, Fast
Booking.com’s #WingItYeah summer campaign invited travelers to share photos of their spontaneous adventures for a chance to have them turned into personalized animated GIFs. The activation served as the finale to the broader summer campaign, using real vacation moments as the raw material and giving fans something more memorable than a standard social reply.
Working with Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, I was one of four artists turning selected fan photos into quick, custom animations over an eight-day production sprint. Each image needed its own visual joke and had to be finished fast enough to send back while the moment still felt fresh. Together, we created 91 GIFs that generated 16.4 million views.
CLIENT
Booking.com
AGENCY
Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam
STUDIO
Weirdo Works
YEAR
2015
MY ROLE
Concept & Animation
COLLABORATiNG ARTISTS
Cari Vander Yacht
Chris Timmons
James Kerr
DELIVERABLES
Personalized GIFs, Social Content, Real-Time Animation
RESULTS
91 fan photos animated in 8 days
16.4M GIF views
6.4M unique Facebook reach
25K fan engagements
40K new users
500K+ visits to the summer campaign hub
AWARDS
Shorty Finalist, Animated GIFs, 2015
One Photo, One Joke
Every GIF started with a different fan submission, so there wasn’t much of a template to fall back on. The photo was the setup; the animation had to become the punchline. Sometimes that meant exaggerating something already happening in the picture. Other times it meant taking the image somewhere completely unexpected.
The turnaround kept the ideas honest. There wasn’t time to overbuild anything—the joke had to read quickly, the animation had to stay simple, and the finished GIF had to get back to the traveler while their original post was still part of the conversation.
2,500+ vacation photos submitted in seven days.
91 winning photos turned into personalized GIFs and sent back to their owners.
16.4 million GIF views across the activation.
The campaign brought in 40,000 new users during the summer activation.
#Wingityeah social engagement observed 25,000 fan engagements, recruited 40,000 new users, reached 6.4m unique people on Facebook alone and drove over half a million people to the summer campaign hub, all with the help of quirky vacation GIFs.
Results:
- The #wingityeah social engagement drove over 2,500 photo entries within a 7-day period.
- During the #wingityeah social activation period 91 ‘summer winning’ photos were turned into personalized GIFs and shared back with the owner via social media.
- #wingityeah social engagement observed 25,000 fan engagements, recruited 40,000 new, reached 6.4m unique people on Facebook alone and drove over half a million people to the summer campaign hub.
- The GIFs collectively received 16.4m views.
