How Michele Rousseau is driving creative change at Expedia

When growing up on a hobby farm in Surrey, England, it fell to Michele Rousseau to feed the third lamb, which the ewe mother could not support with only two teats. That task, along with regular farm chores, instilled her with a “ridiculous work ethic,” she said. See all of Ad Age's 2023 Leading Women here That mindset followed Rousseau through a university education in marine biology, a three-month project measuring worm larvae migration off the coast of France, and an eventual realization that marketing was a better career fit than biology. “I didn’t want to look down a microscope the rest of my life,” Rousseau said. Instead, she found herself helping to launch Apple’s iPhone in Europe in the late 2000s, debuting the iPad shortly after and working on branding for Apple Music. After 13 years of innovating for the tech giant, she joined Expedia Group as senior VP, global brand in 2021 to solve a big challenge for the travel agency. “We had to completely redo the systems and processes to enable good creative to get made,” Rousseau said, noting that Expedia’s brands—its namesake, Hotels.com and Vrbo—were operating in silos and cannibalizing each other. “We’ve started to differentiate our three main brands from each other and from the competitive landscape,” she said. This summer, Rousseau plans to roll out Expedia’s new One Key loyalty program, which she calls the “gateway to our brands.” “People don’t know Hotels and Vrbo and Expedia are the same company, so we need to pull them apart to bring them back together and thread them using One Key,” she said. What advice would you give your younger self? If we’re talking to the mid-20s version of myself, I’d say enjoy the work-hard, play-hard lifestyle while you can because it doesn’t last forever! Otherwise, something I’ll always live by is to push yourself out of your comfort zone and know your strengths. As a child, I was always extremely determined to be independent, and that’s benefited me throughout my career. It’s guided my decision-making process, whether knowing when to move roles or companies or when to stand my ground. What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken? I’ve been fortunate enough to relocate three times in my career. The first was the biggest of the three as, at the time, I was heading up brand, advertising and retail comms for Apple. The team wanted me to relocate to the Bay Area in San Francisco, but I had family responsibilities and caring for two young children to balance. I knew the minute I said yes, we’d be on a plane, so when the time felt right, my family and I found ourselves in San Francisco. It was a challenge to uproot my kids and carve out a new network, but it was an incredible experience. Two years later, once we’d settled, the second risk was uprooting everyone again and moving to LA for a new role at Apple. The opportunity was too good to turn down; not only did it trigger my decision to leave marcom and take on a managing director role for services marketing, but it’s where I met my partner in crime and current creative co-lead Hector Muelas. During the pandemic, we both decided it was time to move back to Europe, and that’s how we got to where we are today! If you weren’t doing your current job, what would you be doing and why? Outside of my current job, I’ve just had the huge honor of being asked to be a trustee of a brilliant charity: UFULU. A friend founded the charity dedicated to helping end period poverty in Malawi. It’s a cause that’s incredibly close to my heart, and I’m so excited to help contribute to its success. What should the industry do to encourage more women and people of color into its ranks? One thing I’m exceptionally proud of is that 70% of my team is female. As an organization, Expedia Group is extremely committed to creating a diverse and representative workforce. It has specific hiring goals to achieve this—including women occupying 50% of roles at all levels by the end of 2025. And 25% of U.S. external hires at all levels are from racially and ethnically underrepresented groups from the end of 2021 onward. We must also identify and remove all barriers women and people of color face in the workplace. As a working mother, I’ve witnessed women after maternity leave worrying if there’s a job to return to or if it’s the same job. In the early parts of my career, I didn’t have the ability to impact change, but I’m now in a role where I can. My commitment to anyone on my team returning from maternity leave is they will return to the same job. How do you expect emerging tech like Web3 and AI to impact your job in the future? It’s something I’m closely tracking. There are already cases of Generative AI inserting itself in the media and marketing industries with relatively low-risk functions like mockups and copywriting. As with any new technology in its infancy, there can be a lot of negativity around how it could impact jobs and society at large, but I believe there are a lot of examples of where AI has taken on tasks that can be perceived as either more admin-focused or repetitive, to free up creatives’ time to focus on adding the brand voice and magic into communications and campaigns. On a broader level, AI isn’t a new concept for Expedia Group. We’ve been using it for years to design products and services that take the complexity out of the travel planning and booking journey for our travelers—like Price Tracking and Predictions that use our flight-shopping data, AI and machine learning to compare today’s flight price with historical price trends to help travelers make an informed decision on when to book their chosen route. Or more recently, we launched an in-app conversational trip-planning experience powered by ChatGPT. It’s available on the iOS Expedia app in the English language and uses AI conversations to provide trip recommendations based on the chat. At the end of the conversation, it pulls the hotel recommendations from the conversation to a new “trip” in the app. So we have some incredibly innovative products being designed by our tech teams, and then our team gets to go away and dream up the creative concepts to get them in front of our travelers. “Wisdom & Obi” is the first time we’ve been able to center creative around an AI product, and it’s a spot that our team is incredibly proud of. See all of Ad Age's 2023 Leading Women here

How Michele Rousseau is driving creative change at Expedia

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