At a time in our competitive industry when outside-the-box thinking is all but a requirement, the professionals featured by HOTELS can inspire you to think differently. This week, it’s Landis Smithers, chief creative officer at Standard International — and a hospitality newbie with a lot of big ideas. Last week: Maram Kokandi, who made history as the first female hotel general manager in Saudi Arabia. Stay tuned each week for another profile of a hotelier challenging the status quo — they’re all featured in HOTELS People Issue, publishing in April.
Landis Smithers has no experience in hospitality. And as far as Standard International is concerned, that’s a great thing.
Perhaps the most crucial piece of experience the 47-year-old Smithers possesses is his innate talent for the reimagining of ideas that tend to get stuck. Hired by New York-based Standard International in January as chief creative officer, Smithers most recently was vice president of marketing and creative director at Grindr.
Yes, that’s Grindr, the former gay hook-up app turned social networking opportunity for gay, bi, trans and queer people.
“When I got the call for this job, it was through someone I knew who had been asked, ‘Do you know a creative who isn’t in the industry who is really good at disputing the norm and looking at things through fresh eyes?’” says Smithers. “And this friend said, ‘There’s only one person you should talk to,’ and gave him my name.’”
Smithers, who has held creative director positions at Pepsi and Playboy, and worked as a fashion photographer, says he already was drawn to hotel brand before being offered the role, having regularly stayed at The Standard High Line in New York for years.
“The brand has always been really good about combining elements that most other brands would kill to unlock,” he says. “There’s this quality of high energy, constant change, things always being curious and possible.”
‘Big-picture opportunity’
The Smithers of Grindr was a leader, pushing the app firmly out of preconceived notions the world had about it. In 2016, Smithers helped coordinate a live stream, exclusive to Grindr, of the unveiling of Irish fashion designer J.W. Anderson’s 2016-17 line.
“I had to take this app that was primarily known for one thing, and yet had this massive user base” – basically a million men at any given minute, spending an average of 57 minutes on the app per day.
“So I started thinking about it as a captive?audience,” Smithers continues. “And then I started looking at their behavior and thinking, this truly is a channel. So what can we feed to people that will not necessarily disrupt the experience, but provide them with entertainment or information?”
One of Smithers’ colleagues at Grindr was Katie Dineen, who at the time was the company’s director of events and experiences.
“He has a rare gift for communicating his vision, getting people to sign off on his unorthodox plans, and in building engaged, empowered teams,” Dineen says.
Read Smithers’ 3 tips for hoteliers
A concept like the fashion show live stream can also be applied to hospitality, Smithers says.
“We also have a form of captive audience, we actually have stages,” he says. “So how do we start thinking of the experience of staying at a property more as a spectacle? And something that’s?ever-changing and not predictable.”
In addition to the fashion show streaming (which generated a million views in the moment and over a billion press hits over eight months, according to Smithers), he also coordinated a project that tapped into a different need within Grindr’s community and delivered on it.
“Gaymojis” were a concept created under Smithers’ tenure at Grindr. The first 100 of the in-house developed gay lifestyle emojis were free; after that, users had to pay US$3.99 to unlock an additional 400.
Standard also is a company invested in its digital arm, says Smithers, who points to the launch of the One Night app, the first third-party mobile platform for independent hotels offering same-night reservations at the lowest available rates.
“I love this company because they didn’t keep (the app) just to our properties,” says Smithers. “They actually thought: ‘This is something that we can open up to the community at large.’”
“Landis’ mere presence at Grindr was enough to get people excited – it’s like he stirs the pot and turns on the heat at the same time,” Dineen says.
Smithers has his eye set firmly on the potential at Standard.
“I feel like a kid in a candy shop,” he says. “What I would like to do is start opening up to the community and looking at marketing and sales that is more about drawing people in, rather than pushing message out.”
So if I’ve got a killer room that’s not being used for a week for whatever reason, why wouldn’t I bring in a filmmaker and let them do whatever they want to in that room? And maybe that room becomes famous because they did something there and that becomes a place that you want to stay so you can live whatever story they told in that space,” says Smithers.