The following statement may seem to be fly in the face of economic sense at first. It’s a great time to be in the travel business. Now with American Airlines filing chapter 11 just two months ago, and a sluggish economy holding consumer-spending hostage, it might seem to be just the opposite. However, if all digital marketing verticals had the momentum and forward-thinking strategies that the travel vertical has shown, we’d all party like it’s 1999.
Full disclosure: We’re in the travel business. But it’s not our only business. We saw substantial increases month-to-month for our audience-targeting platform over the past 12 months. In fact, we have almost 250 million individual customer data profiles. But this not an individual success story. This is a vertical success story. The success of the travel ad vertical can be duplicated, and should be duplicated as brands like P&G, Unliever and GM increase the acceleration of their overall budgets from offline to online spend. Kantar Media reported in November, “the display spending gain of 12.9 percent and 8.6 percent spike in search (for 2011) were driven by travel, local service and insurance categories.”
We know from other data that offline spending for travel was flat. The... Read more
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Travel: Come Fly With Me
Tags: brand loyalty, Data, loyalty, Targeting, travel
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The Post-Data Age
By all accounts 2011 was the year of mass migration. Marketing budgets migrated online by incredible percentages, and 2012 looks to be more of the same. One of the main reasons is audience data. This business has reached the point where nothing less than reaching the right customer with the most relevant message is unacceptable. Now the travel business enters the post-data age. While travel brands should continue to work on the security and precision of their audience data, a recent annual client meeting with major travel brands showed us that three developments would follow the comfort level that travel brands have with audience data.
One: Premium Advertising: By premium ads we mean the digital ad opportunities that are laser-targeted on in-market customers and customers that are most receptive to marketing messages. Precision audience targeting gives travel brands access to their best prospects, at scale in a safe environment. It’s not about remnant inventory purchased via a general network or exchange. Data has been secured to the point where brands should feel comfortable with the ability to cross-pollinate loyalty programs and share other non-personally identifiable information.
Two: Mobile: Mobile ad partners cannot own a space on the mobile interface. But they can... Read more
Tags: Data, mobile, travel
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The Value of a Truly Loyal Audience
Be they retail outlets, hotels, airlines, or restaurants, we all have brands with which we have longstanding relationships, whose products and services we go back to over and over again, especially for online purchasing. We trust these brands with our information, and we opt in to their reward programs because of that trust, not just the coupons. As such, we are infinitely more willing to devote attention to their communications, we accept their emails into our address books, we click through on their ads and we keep the dialogue open.
Loyalty programs are highly valuable for maintaining relationships and building loyalty with existing customers, as well as enticing new customers. But loyalty programs do more than just give customers rewards for making purchases. Through these types of programs, brands are able to keep an open dialogue with their consumers regarding their unique interests, types of products and services they gravitate toward, etc., and then offer them incentives tailored to those preferences. The data gleaned from these programs represents a new gold standard of data for marketers – data that represents real time, detailed information, and that is entirely opt-in, shared openly and willingly.
Audience targeting often relies on behavioral data, which... Read more
Tags: audience, Data, loyalty, online advertising, online marketing, Privacy, Targeting
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