Inside Expedia’s year-long partnership with mega creator IShowSpeed

Expedia declined to reveal a specific deal size. A source familiar with creator deals of this size told Digiday they’d estimate the cost of such a partnership at around $250,000. 

According to Lauri Metrose, Expedia’s senior vp of global communications, the travel company, which already has a creator marketing arm, preparing for the unofficially titled “Exspeedia” campaign was “intensive.” 

The brand kicked off the year-long partnership by sponsoring an April 29 stream in which Watkins Jr. visited five Caribbean countries in a single day – a launch which Metrose said took more than six months of planning. The deal also includes an interactive site showing clips from Watkins Jr.’s travels and letting visitors vote on where he goes next and a dedicated TikTok account.)

“[Watkins Jr.] has an opinion on everything, as he should, from the teaser trailer to how the website needs to look and feel,” Metrose said.

Expedia brought in experts in the gaming and streaming industries ahead of the partnership to ensure it felt like a natural fit for the desired Gen Z audience. “As a brand, you can’t just try and infiltrate a world that you don’t really understand, because people will call bullshit right out,” she said. 

The experience was a wildly different one for the travel company, whose creator marketing has largely skewed older than Gen Z until this point. With the cost of travel rising due to the ongoing war in the Middle East, pulling in a new generation of potential travellers seems more crucial now than ever, and Expedia believed Watkins Jr. holds the keys to Gen Z. 

“For Gen Z, travel is often a spontaneous expression of mood,” said Adrienne Beck, head of marketing insights and analytics at The Weather Company. “By aligning with high-energy creators and positive environmental contexts, brands can tap into a state of mind where travel is viewed less as a planned expense to be optimized and more as an immediate experience to be seized.” 

Metrose said this was a brand awareness play, not one necessarily concerned with ROI (Expedia did not provide metrics for the campaign’s engagement, though the two sponsored livestreams currently have 1.9 million and 6.8 million views on IShowSpeed’s YouTube channel). 

Brand awareness over everything

Jackie Abrokwa, director of brand partnerships at influencer management agency Kensington Grey, said brand equity and cultural relevance are a “deeper ROI” that “take longer to show up in a spreadsheet.” 

Abrowka said if it were her campaign, she’d been looking at metrics around audience growth around the target demo and if there’s sustained engagement over the entire arc of the campaign rather than a single spike

“The fan-voting mechanic is also a smart measurement tool in disguise,” she said. “Every vote, every sweepstakes entry, every follow on @Exspeedia_ is a data point that tells you how many people moved from passive viewers to active participants.”

Metrose said that the goal of this campaign is to be “part of the cultural conversation. “The booking is honestly the gravy on it. It’s really to become culturally relevant as a brand and do something different,” she said. 

That different approach involved working with a creator whose frenetic energy can occasionally lead to streaming chaos.

“We were told straight up when we first started working with him that ‘Speed is Speed. You’re not going to edit him. You’re not going to do anything.’ Speed is speed, and that’s what makes him so special,” Metrose said. 

While planning the collaboration, Metrose said Expedia chose to take a hands-off approach: no scripts for the livestream, no required brand placement and an embracing of natural, unfiltered storytelling. They created their own “war room” of people who could clip the most brand-safe moments of Watkins Jr.’s stream to use across social channels. 

Watkins Jr. told Digiday in a statement that Expedia “let [him] be [himself].”

“My streams are live so you can’t overplan. It’s honestly a lot of improv. You have to let things unfold and trust the process – our team’s curiosity, experience and sensibilities after doing so many of these global tours will always lead us to the right moments.” 

Kensington Grey’s Abrokwa said giving Watkins Jr. freedom helps ensure Expedia’s campaign will resonate with his massive, largely Gen Z audience. 

“Restricting a creator’s authenticity in today’s creator economy is a much bigger gamble than letting them run free. Gen Z has a highly calibrated detector for inauthenticity and anything deemed “inauthentic” likely won’t perform well,” Abrowka said. 

Expedia embracing Watkin’s hyper-specific content style and what Abrowka calls his “one-of-a-kind personality” ensured they could leverage his star power rather than dampen it. 

“There’s always brand risk when you deviate from “the norm,” but the reward is well worth it if you’re trying to gain new audiences, reclaim relevance and genuinely move the needle,” Abrowka said. 

This partnership also signals a notable shift in how the company approaches creator marketing, according to Influencer Marketing Factory co-founder and CEO, Alessandro Bogliari. For him, Expedia is now treating creators like channels rather than media buys – especially when you take into account the length of the partnership. 

“A year isn’t a campaign, it’s a content property,” he said. “One-off deals get you a spike. A year builds association. By the end of 2026, when a Gen Z kid thinks ‘I want to travel like Speed,’ the next thought is Expedia. And every other travel CMO now has to find their version of this.”