By EPR Editorial Team
Originally published November 2021. Updated June 2026.
Expedia Group's 2021 Black Friday campaign — a 15-second spot built around the line "A TV, or the place on the TV?" — was the first major creative deliverable from the brand's then-new agency partnership with Anomaly and is now the canonical case study in pandemic-recovery travel marketing. The campaign launched on November 26, 2021, ran across Expedia, Vrbo, and Hotels.com, and was credited internally with helping anchor the 47% year-over-year booking growth Expedia Group reported across Q4 2021.
Part of EPR's Expedia coverage. See also: Expedia's Data-Driven Marketing Engine · Expedia's Sustainability Story · Expedia's Employee Experience and Culture.
The campaign — "A TV, or the place on the TV?"
The creative concept was direct. A 15-second video opens on a tranquil beach scene displayed on a flat-screen television. The camera zooms in until the TV bezel disappears and the beach becomes the full frame. A voiceover asks: "This Black Friday, do you want a TV, or do you want the place on the TV?" The spot ran across television, digital media, and in-mall screens during the Black Friday weekend.
Anomaly built the campaign. The independent New York-headquartered agency, founded in 2004 by Carl Johnson, Karina Wilsher, Jason DeLand, and Ernest Lupinacci, had been named Expedia Group's lead creative agency earlier in 2021. Anomaly's existing roster — Diageo, ASICS, Converse, Beats by Dre — already included multiple brands with category-defining campaigns. The Expedia win was Anomaly's largest single-account placement in travel.
The strategic concept underneath the creative was the more important asset. The Black Friday shopping holiday — a $9 billion U.S. retail event in 2021 — had been built since the 1980s on the displacement of consumer dollars from one category (services, savings) into another (electronics, apparel, durable goods). Expedia's campaign inverted the displacement: instead of competing for share of the Black Friday shopping wallet, Expedia argued the Black Friday wallet should not be spent on goods at all. Travel, the campaign argued, was the better Black Friday purchase.
Why the campaign worked
Three structural factors aligned. First, the post-pandemic travel demand environment. By late 2021, the U.S. CDC had announced that vaccinated foreign travelers could enter the country starting November 8, 2021. Pent-up demand was visible across every traffic dashboard at Expedia, Booking.com, Airbnb, and the broader OTA category. Q3 2021 Expedia gross bookings had already exceeded Q3 2019, a recovery milestone the company had publicly anticipated.
Second, the tri-brand activation. The campaign was the first major joint Expedia + Vrbo + Hotels.com creative since Expedia Group's 2020 brand restructure under CEO Peter Kern. Vrbo had outperformed expectations through 2020 and the first half of 2021 because of the pandemic-era preference for entire-home rentals. Hotels.com had recovered more slowly. Combining the three brands around a single Black Friday message let the company present its full inventory inside one creative envelope.
Third, the messaging discipline. The campaign avoided pandemic explicit framing. No mention of COVID, no acknowledgment of the prior 18 months of restrictions, no commentary on health-and-safety posture. The implicit recovery narrative — that travel was back — landed because the creative trusted the audience to fill in the context. The 15-second runtime was disciplined; the message was a single question, not a list of features.
The numbers behind the spot
Expedia Group reported Q4 2021 revenue of $2.28 billion, up 147% year-over-year and within 12% of Q4 2019. Gross bookings of $17.5 billion in Q4 2021 were up 96% year-over-year. The Black Friday weekend specifically — between November 26 and November 29, 2021 — produced the highest single-weekend booking volume Expedia had recorded since the pandemic began. The company did not break out the campaign's contribution discretely, but the Q4 2021 earnings call cited the holiday-marketing initiative as a contributing factor.
Vrbo, in particular, reported December 2021 booking volumes for vacation-rental properties exceeding the December 2019 baseline by more than 25%. The first-half 2022 follow-through was similarly strong. Expedia ranked the campaign as one of the highest-ROI brand activations the company had run in the prior five years.
The Anomaly partnership in context
Anomaly's 2021 selection as Expedia Group's lead creative agency followed a sustained internal restructuring at Expedia that began under Mark Okerstrom (CEO 2017-2020) and accelerated under Peter Kern (CEO 2020-2024). The agency-of-record consolidation aligned with Expedia's broader operational restructuring — fewer brand silos, more centralized creative leadership under the Group structure.
Before Anomaly, Expedia had worked with multiple agencies across its various brand units — 180LA, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, and a rotation of regional shops. The 2021 consolidation to Anomaly as the lead creative shop, with continuing project-by-project relationships across the broader agency ecosystem, was the largest Expedia agency reset since the company's original IAC days.
The campaign has been credited as a template that other OTA and travel brands have studied. Booking.com, Airbnb, Hopper, and the broader competitive set have each subsequently produced post-pandemic creative work that follows the same playbook: short runtime, declarative central question, implicit recovery context, tri-brand or multi-property activation across owned inventory.
What the Black Friday campaign signaled about Expedia's broader strategy
The campaign was the visible-creative end of a deeper Expedia Group operating thesis. Throughout 2020 and 2021, Peter Kern and Expedia CFO Eric Hart had publicly argued that the post-pandemic travel recovery would be permanent, not transitional — that consumer preference for travel as a category of discretionary spend had structurally increased after 18 months of restriction. The Black Friday campaign translated that thesis into media spend.
Ariane Gorin succeeded Kern as Expedia Group CEO in May 2024. The thesis has continued under her leadership: Q1 2025 Expedia Group revenue of $2.99 billion and gross bookings of $30.6 billion both came in above analyst consensus. The travel-as-permanent-discretionary-category framing has held across the post-pandemic recovery period.
