Airbnb: We Accept

Have you ever booked and lived in an Airbnb house? If yes, have you enjoyed your stay there? Is the owner friendly and hospitable? I spent a real happy time in the Airbnb house when we were in Florida. It is white wooden house surrounded by some trees and bushes. Every morning the birds and the sunshine pouring through the windows woke us up. Everything in the house was clean and neat, from every single cup to every piece of carpet. Although we didn’t meet the owner, we could feel her warm welcome from all parts of the house. During our stay there, the owner didn’t show up. I was surprised at her trust in us because all the communication between us was through the Internet. We were probably cheaters (although actually we are not hhhh). However, because of her trust, we enjoyed our days there and we protected and cherished her house like ours! As a result of the cheeriness I have through Airbnb, I put my eyes on Airbnb’s Super Bowl Ad this year. (Although our landlord is very nice, I still want to say Airbnb’s CS team is so poor…)

This year, Airbnb’s ad names We Accept. They conveyed the messages of acceptance, love and multiculturalism by putting different people’s half faces together as different whole faces. These people were from different countries, races with different colors and genders. Like Expedia and Coco-Cola, Airbnb this year didn’t promote their brand with the exception of their tiny logo which appeared at the end of the ad. The ad began with a pupil and then zoom out to people’s faces. The pupil implies our eyes and how we see the world. Different faces flashed through the screen with appearance of some white words: We believe no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love or who you worship, we all belong. The world is more beautiful the more you accept. #weaccept. Theses simply words emphasized the idea of “acceptance”. We should accept difference, we should be more tolerant to others, we should respect diverse cultures. And also, Airbnb as a brand of hospitality, they emphasized “home”, “united” in the ad as well by using the sentence “we all belong”. Here, it may imply that Airbnb could provide homes and shelters to people in need, which matched their idea and slogan “book unique homes”.

Besides the humanistic care Airbnb delivered, the ad was also on the list of politically charged commercials this Super Bowl season. To some extent, the racism has raised after the election. There are always news stories all over the nation that immigrants are attacked by extreme racists. Due to some claims stated by President Trump (these claims might be overemphasized by media), racists (maybe wrongly?) believed that the United States was trying to drive away immigrants. People now, especially 61 million immigrants are in a picnic. They are not sure whether they still belong to the US or where they should belong to. Airbnb expressed their care and support to all human without consideration of races, countries, colors, or genders. They posted the ad on their website along with a letter #weaccept. In the letter, Airbnb noted the reasons they made such an ad and what they have done. They’ve provided housing for evacuees of disasters. They started to provide free housing to refugees and those barred from entering the US.

Nevertheless, compared with the optimistic idea Airbnb tried to convey, the comments on YouTube under the ad were not optimistic. There are 4 million views of the ad on YouTube since Feb 5, 2017. 1,736 comments are made by netizens. People on YouTube don’t buy the ad. The reasons of thumb-down are different. Some of them think it hypocritical because of some behaviors Airbnb acted. Some of them object because the different political viewpoints. The big amount of negative comments makes me think how difficult it is for companies to find the balance point between groundswell and politics.