Momondo's The DNA Journey, created by Copenhagen agency &Co in 2016, united 67 people through DNA testing to prove human connection and drive a 45% traffic
ARCHIVEMomondo The DNA Journey Turned a Travel Search Into a Human Story
Momondo's The DNA Journey is a 2016 digital campaign created by Copenhagen agency &Co in which 67 people from around the world took DNA tests to discover their ancestral origins, revealing that human beings share far deeper global connections than most assume, and inviting audiences to embrace travel as an act of openness.
The campaign launched globally on June 2, 2016, as reported by momondo.com, with a localised teaser phase beginning in late May 2016. According to momondo.com, those teaser executions posed pointed questions to Scandinavian audiences — "How Danish are we really?" and "How Swedish are we really?" — deliberately priming a sense of national identity before the main film dismantled it. The principal video was shot in Copenhagen across April 6 to 8, 2016, per clapboard.com, with the Danish capital serving as both the literal and symbolic centre of the campaign.
The DNA Journey operated under momondo's broader "Let's open our world" purpose platform, as documented by Momondo Ca, which positioned the brand not merely as a flight-search utility but as an advocate for tolerance and cross-cultural curiosity. In Denmark and across international markets, the campaign offered 500 DNA kits through a partnership with AncestryDNA and ran a companion survey of 7,200 people, according to momondo.ca. Of the 67 participants cast from around the world, 16 appeared in the principal film, per clapboard.com. The DNA tests examined ancestry reaching approximately 500 to 2,000 years into the past, according to Momondo, confronting participants — and viewers — with a scale of shared heritage that no two-country assumption could contain. Clapboard scores The DNA Journey 86 out of 100, recognising its structural ambition, emotional craft, and demonstrable commercial impact.
ARCHIVEMomondo is a travel-search brand owned by KAYAK, which is itself part of Booking Holdings, according to momondo.com. That corporate lineage placed momondo in direct competition with well-resourced rivals including Kayak, Trivago, and Google Flights, which, as reported by Skift, was described in October 2016 as "exploding" over the preceding eighteen months. Against that backdrop, outspending competitors on conventional performance media was not a viable path to differentiation.
The strategic insight that &Co identified was both sociological and commercial. According to clapboard.com, most people dramatically underestimate the geographic spread of their ancestry, assuming their heritage traces back to no more than two countries. The campaign's premise — that science could expose this misconception in real time, on camera, with real people — gave momondo a mechanism to generate genuine emotional surprise rather than simulated brand warmth. Director Jeppe Rønde, speaking via momondo.com, stated that the campaign's objective was to break down cultural barriers between travellers and new cultures, framing curiosity about the world as something biologically encoded in every person.
The broader market context reinforced the urgency of this positioning. According to Skift, the global travel advertising market around 2016 was a highly competitive environment in which Google's growing presence in flight and hotel search was driving up marketing costs across the metasearch category. In Denmark and across other Scandinavian markets where momondo held established brand equity, the localised teaser campaign — documented by momondo.com — transformed a universal human-interest story into a nationally resonant provocation. The decision to anchor the campaign's physical production in Copenhagen, while recruiting participants from around the world, mirrored momondo's core commercial proposition: a Danish-founded brand built to connect local travellers with the entire globe.
Director Jeppe Rønde led the production of The DNA Journey for Copenhagen production company Bacon, bringing a documentary sensibility to what could easily have become a scripted brand film. Rønde articulated the central creative idea via momondo.com as follows: "through DNA testing, we're all actually a little bit from everywhere and that as a consequence, we're all made the same." That philosophical premise demanded a casting and production approach rigorous enough to earn it.
According to momondo.com, the 67 participants were selected through a combination of traditional casting — in which candidates told their own life stories — and DNA testing that mapped their geographic origins. Casting director Robert Cerkez and strategist Tue Rossel, credited in production documentation associated with the &Co team, shaped a participant group whose personal narratives and DNA results were chosen specifically because they complemented and complicated each other in ways the camera could capture authentically. Participants held strong national or ethnic identities, often ones historically in tension with other groups represented in the room, which meant the moment of DNA revelation carried genuine dramatic stakes rather than manufactured sentiment.
The principal shoot took place over three days in Copenhagen, April 6 to 8, 2016, per clapboard.com, an unusually compressed window for a film of this emotional and logistical complexity. The finished work was distributed as a digital-first asset — momondo.com reports one media asset in the campaign — designed to travel organically through social sharing rather than through paid broadcast placement alone. Shots.net noted the campaign's documentary approach as a defining creative decision, one that positioned the brand's message inside an observational register audiences associate with truth rather than advertising. The result was a film that functioned simultaneously as branded content, social experiment, and editorial journalism.
Momondo reported a forty-five percent increase in site traffic on June 3, 2016 — the day after launch — and a forty-three percent increase on June 4, both driven by new visitors, according to momondo.com. Those two consecutive days of double-digit new-visitor growth represent a measurable commercial outcome directly attributable to the campaign's earned media ignition, not to a paid media burst.
The campaign video reached approximately 175 million views across YouTube, Facebook, third-party pages, and momondo's microsite, as reported by LinkedIn and dandad.org. That figure positions The DNA Journey among the most-watched branded documentary films produced in Denmark, and among the most distributed purpose-led travel campaigns of its era globally. According to dandad.org, the campaign received recognition from D&AD, one of the advertising industry's most selective creative awards bodies, affirming the work's standing among peers as well as with public audiences.
No single metric captures the full structural effectiveness of The DNA Journey, but the combination of immediate traffic impact, sustained view count, and peer recognition across creative and effectiveness platforms confirms that the campaign succeeded on its own terms. In a Danish market where momondo faced intensifying competition from Google Flights and Trivago, as documented by Skift, the campaign converted brand purpose into measurable audience behaviour. The strategic decision to root emotional provocation in verifiable science — real DNA tests, real participants, real results — gave the campaign a credibility that allowed it to earn distribution in editorial contexts, amplifying reach well beyond any paid media investment could have achieved on a comparable budget.
The DNA Journey is a 2016 digital campaign by momondo in which 67 people from around the world took DNA tests to discover their ancestral origins. Created by Copenhagen agency &Co and directed by Jeppe Rønde, it launched globally on June 2, 2016, as part of momondo's "Let's open our world" purpose platform.
The DNA Journey was created by Danish agency &Co and produced by Copenhagen production company Bacon. Director Jeppe Rønde led the film's production. The campaign was shot in Copenhagen across three days in April 2016, per clapboard.com, and published in Denmark in June 2016.
Sixty-seven people participated in The DNA Journey campaign overall, according to momondo.com. Of those, 16 appeared in the principal film. Participants were selected through traditional casting and DNA testing, with their personal stories and ancestral results chosen to complement each other on camera, per momondo.com.
Momondo reported a forty-five percent increase in site traffic on June 3, 2016, the day after launch, according to momondo.com. The campaign video reached approximately 175 million views across YouTube, Facebook, and momondo's microsite, as reported by dandad.org and LinkedIn, and received recognition from D&AD.
The DNA Journey was designed to position momondo as an advocate for openness and cross-cultural curiosity, as documented by momondo.ca. Director Jeppe Rønde stated via momondo.com that the objective was to break down cultural barriers between travellers and new cultures, using DNA science to prove shared human heritage.
The DNA Journey was filmed in Copenhagen, Denmark, across April 6 to 8, 2016, per clapboard.com. It was created by &Co, a Copenhagen-based advertising agency, and produced by Bacon. The campaign was published in Denmark in June 2016 and distributed globally as a digital-first media asset.
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