Airbnb's Icons campaign lets people book themed listings tied to cultural moments, from the Barbie house to other unconventional stays. The comms team built it to prove you can list anything on the platform, and it scaled until the Barbie house became the ultimate example of how far hosts could push it.
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The Icons, what ultimately we now call the Icons campaign, has been living at Airbnb for quite a long time. And we have an incredibly talented comms team that came up with this idea with Brian a long time ago. And it's a brilliant way to go out. And, you know, it enriches this idea that you can Airbnb anything, and it also allows, like, fans of Barbie or fans of whatever movie to participate more in that world, you know, and so it's this perfect combination of, like, you have a cultural moment with Barbie, you have a lot of fans, you have this natural connection because there's a Barbie house, and then you have Airbnb, and then the ability to participate by booking that house and, you know, reinforces us doing kind of being able to list crazy things, have hosts list crazy things. And so, yeah, that concept was developed by the comms team a while back, and as they started to do these things, they got bigger and bigger and bigger, and the Barbie house was kind of the, you know, the apex of this thing.