Advertising: Casting Yourself in a Wild, Forgotten Night

Now, in a Web promotion reminiscent of the movie, Hotels.com is encouraging people to cast themselves in their own hotel misadventures by substituting their faces and the faces of friends for those of actors in provocative videos.

On a site for the campaign, TripYourFace.com, a user can upload a photo from a Facebook profile and profile photos of up to three friends. After choosing the actors to superimpose the faces onto, users crop uploaded faces, adjusting brightness and color to match those of the actors, and then are taken to a screen that features a hotel room in New York, Las Vegas or Paris.

As in “The Hangover,” each features a tableau of unconscious characters in a room in disarray. In Paris, for example, feathers are strewn all over a room where four blindfolded musicians, in formal attire, are slumped over their instruments, a fencer in a white outfit and mask is asleep in a chair, and Dennis Rodman, the retired basketball player, is passed out shirtless in a bed along with two lingerie-clad women.

Clicking one of three play buttons in the scene prompts a video “flashback” that helps piece together the scene: for Paris, one clip shows the two women in a pillow fight, then tearing off Mr. Rodman’s shirt as he sprays the room with Champagne.

But with the face substitutions, one actress ripping off Mr. Rodman’s shirt can instead be a Facebook user’s friend. And a segment of the video, starring that unwitting friend, can be posted directly to her Facebook profile, which Hotels.com of course hopes will prompt her to visit the Trip Your Face site and subsequently engage other friends in the campaign.

The videos lack the verisimilitude of, say, the special effects that substituted the face of Natalie Portman for that of a professional ballerina in some dancing sequences in “The Black Swan.” But it is more technologically sophisticated than earlier campaigns in which consumers uploaded their faces into two-dimensional situations like Elf Yourself, a viral OfficeMax campaign first executed during the holiday season in 2006, which was two-dimensional and low-tech, resembling “South Park.”

The Hotels.com campaign is by Y&R Chicago, part of Young & Rubicam, with the production company B-Reel. The Las Vegas hotel room situation features another celebrity, the rapper Vanilla Ice, while the New York option has no celebrities.

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“We wanted to produce something where people could put their faces into live action, which I don’t think has been done in a campaign before, and it certainly hasn’t been done in our category,” said Vic Walia, senior director for North America brand advertising at Hotels.com, which is owned by Expedia.

“Since they are a digital company and digital brand it’s important for them to invest in new and emerging technology, not just for the e-commerce site but also for the way in which they market and brand themselves,” said Matthew Witt, director of digital production at Young & Rubicam.

The campaign aligns with how people use Facebook, said Sonya Grewal, a vice president and creative director at Y&R Chicago.

“People post vacation photos on Facebook, so we thought of Facebook as kind of helping us seize this idea,” Ms. Grewal said. “We thought, ‘How cool would it be if you created these videos that happened in hotel rooms, and you are a part of it and so are your friends?’?”

While traffic for the online travel agent category was down 9 percent in March compared with a year ago, according to comScore, Hotels.com traffic rose 9 percent, to 4.9 million unique visitors.

Hotels.com, which declined to reveal the budget for the new campaign, has cut ad spending in each of the last three years, sliding to $31.4 million in 2010 from $70.5 million in 2007, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP.

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After visiting a preview version of the site, Brian Morrissey, editor in chief of Digiday, an online publication that covers digital marketing and media, said it lacked a critical element of successful campaigns like Elf Yourself: simplicity.

Because users are prompted to make numerous cropping, lighting and color adjustments, it can take about five minutes to upload a single photograph, with that time multiplied by the number of friends the user adds. In all, the process can entail dozens of mouse clicks.

“Every click comes with a price, and I expect they’re going to have a very high drop-off rate,” Mr. Morrissey said, referring to users who may give up and leave the site. “If you’re going to ask someone to go through all those steps, the payoff better be huge.”

For his part, Mr. Morrissey was underwhelmed.

“To me the experience was like a long walk for a small beer,” he said.

Mr. Walia, of Hotels.com, said many users would come to the site having already seen their faces in a video shared by friends through Facebook and, because they “know what the payoff is,” will navigate through the uploading process willingly.

“This is taking it up a notch and saying we can make this look more realistic and more lifelike,” Mr. Walia said. “The bar is higher now, and consumers are more and more tech-savvy and we need to give them credit in that area.”