People stay at Airbnb so they can travel and have unforgettable experiences, but it may be hard to top a recent trip undertaken by its CMO.
While visiting his team’s Australian office, Jonathan Mildenhall got to climb to the top of the Sydney Opera House — the same stunt that left movie star Hugh Jackman injured during a taping for the Oprah Winfrey Show. Fortunately, Mildenhall’s journey turned out a lot better — kind of like his journey with Airbnb so far.
Mildenhall told the story about the Sydney Opera House during an interview with Pixel Talk, a YouTube channel run by Stanford Online High School, which serves students through grades 7-12. Though some of the questions were standard (i.e., ‘What’s on your bucket list?’), others were very brand-oriented, and Mildenhall answered with surprising candor.
“We’re not yet a super brand,” he admitted, compared to the likes of Nike, Adidas, Coca-Cola and Apple. “We’ve got a long way to go, but that certainly is the ambition. The biggest challenge is still building awareness — when you look around the world, I still have less than 50% aided awareness — in other words, when shown a list of a brands including Airbnb, they don’t know it.”
Mildenhall said the launch last year of its first multinational ad campaign, “Never A Stranger,” was a major milestone.
“We’d never leaned into a campaign like that,” he said. Other major initiatives have included its biggest-ever host convention, when the company took more than 6,000 people to Paris. “But I’d have to say the biggest moment this year was having Beyoncé stay at Airbnb during Super Bowl weekend.”
There’s a sense Mildenhall’s efforts are contributing to Airbnb’s growth. In the two years he’s been CMO at the San Francisco-based startup, it has grown from 450,000 homes on its platform to 2.3 million, and from 22 million guests to 80 million.
While it’s been some time since Mildenhall’s own high school days, he said he remembered having a “dual personality” — sitting in the front of the class one minute, and smoking behind the bike shed with the rebels afterward.
“Both groups didn’t understand each other,” he reflected, suggesting those formative years have influenced the team he builds up and the agencies with whom he partners. “I’m always fascinated by people and always look to people who are slightly different to me because that’s when I can get maximum learning out of an experience. It’s the same in the workplace today.”
Watch the full clip to understand how Mildenhall connects Madonna and Barack Obama, then pair with Marketing’s interview with Airbnb chief of hospitality Chip Conley from C2 Montreal.
