TL;DR
Hotel Shanker was our department's anchor client, and the "Lights, Camera, Shanker" (L.T.S.) campaign is incredibly close to my heart. It represented my first major strategic pivot toward building Top-of-Funnel awareness through non-traditional methods. By turning an accidental inbound user behavior—utilizing the property as a wedding photoshoot backdrop—into an institutionalized outbound campaign, we successfully added a dominant new keyword to both aided and unaided consumer awareness for this legendary legacy property.
Stack I Used
Campaign Architecture & Grid Flow: Microsoft Excel & Planoly (Mapping out the dense editorial schedule and maintaining palatial grid continuity)
Design, Production & Branding: Canva & Adobe InDesign (Developing a neoclassical visual language anchored by our agency’s custom brand frames)
In-House Multimedia Production: Shot and produced entirely by our agency team, including specific campaign photoshoots that I captured hands-on behind the lens
Platform Deployment: Meta Business Suite & YouTube Studio (Natively executing the brand's first structured cross-platform digital footprint)
Spotting the Outbound Opportunity
When we took on the mandate to build the first digital presence for a 19th-century neoclassical giant like Hotel Shanker, management wanted standard, generic awareness. The lightbulb moment for L.T.S. hit me during a routine monthly meeting at the property. The owners casually mentioned that people were sporadically showing up for wedding photoshoots. It was treated as a random inbound occurrence that no one was paying attention to. I immediately saw an opportunity to shift the strategy: “What if we stop treating this as an accident and turn it into a deliberate outbound campaign?”
High-Production, Premium Simplicity
We brought the entire multimedia production completely in-house to bring this vision to life. The creative brief I gave my visual team was uncompromisingly simple: “Demonstrate the product and the experience without overcomplicating it.” Because the local market can be highly price-shy when costs are posted explicitly on social media, we deliberately omitted pricing from the copy to remove friction and focus entirely on the aspirational, royal "aura" of the palace. I even jumped behind the lens myself for several of the campaign photoshoots to ensure the visual tone captured the exact feeling of luxury heritage.
Institutionalizing a Mainstream Trend
Managing this project as the department principal was a massive test of our early operational capabilities. We balanced horizontal cinematic films like "The Perfect Location For The Perfect Match" on YouTube with elegant, vertical layout flows on Instagram using Excel and Planoly. We successfully transitioned a traditional, 60-year-old establishment into a modern digital leader. The ultimate validation didn't come from a dashboard, but from being out in the wild and naturally overhearing everyday people talk about wanting to book their own milestone shoots at the property.
Learning
Traditional top-of-funnel goals don't always require traditional advertising frameworks. By capturing an existing, organic consumer habit and wrapping it in a consistent brand narrative, you can build deeper brand equity than any standard ad push. While digital attribution remained my professional kryptonite on this project, the campaign directly triggered a massive, undeniable influx of physical property bookings—proving that relentless consistency is the ultimate driver of long-term commercial success.
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