Sharing The Travel Industry's latest Technology
Posts tagged advertising
Interesting findings from PCW and Ypartnership
Aug 29th
Ypartnership has released an expanded summary of the findings that they and PhoCusWright have found on the “Next Generation Traveler”
These findings are really inline with the projections of current online usage, here is a summary of the key stats for the next gen traveler:
- They are smart (30% with a 4-year college degree; 20% with at least one year of graduate school)
- Affluent (30% of households with an annual income in excess of $100,000)
- Multi Generational (50% Echo Boomers (18-28 years) and 50% Baby Boomers (43 to 61 years)
- 71% use the Internet to search for travel information
- 41% have taken a virtual tour of a destination
- 38% have built a trip itinerary online
- 58% cite the “ability to check the best fares/rates” as the most important feature in a travel web site
- 37% report being influenced by personal comments read on social networking or travel advisory web sites, but they frequent social networking sites such as MySpace.com (56%) and Facebook (30%) more than travel advisory or review sites such as TripAdvisor (14%);
- 33% have authored and posted a travel review online.
The summary goes on to state that these consumers are less likely to be influenced by advertising messages. With all of these stats taken into consideration, it is no surprise that the travel industry is in a battle against comoditization.
As Jeremiah Owyang points out with Facebook’s new advertising model, there are new attempts to engage this demographic, and advertisers are striving to penetrate this attention lacking group. These trends are leading me to believe that travel has to really engage the senses and imagination of this new market in order to prompt buying action. A recent interview with Jess Butcher, head of partnerships at online travel experiences company isango!, shed some light into this area.
She was asked what was on the horizon for travel, here is what she said:
“The marriage of ‘where-to-go’ inspiration and commerce functionality is still one that no one’s quite nailed online just yet and we really believe the opportunity here could be immense. There are an increasing number of inspiration-style tools that take activity preference and demographic-detail into consideration, but they tend to culminate in standard flight/ hotel/ car booking engines. There’s a proliferation of new community style-sites, technologies, widgets and trip planning tools emerging right now – from which we expect to see a bit of boom and bust cycle – but looking forward to seeing the winners.”
I agree, there is an ever increasing decline in what hotel, which airline, and which car rental company consumers choose, and more of a focus on “I did the most crazy tour when I was in ____________, check out this amazing tour website!”
Is there life for traditional marketing?
May 20th
With the level of directly traceable and testable configurations that are available with online advertising, does traditional media stand a chance?
TravelMole just brought this interesting article to light. It turns out that for the first time ever, online ad spend has ‘outpaced’ traditional spending at $8 billion last year. It is projected that this will continue to increase to $22.8 Billion by 2012.
While this article does not contrast these findings with the dollar amount spent on traditional media over the past few years, it does raise an interesting point, where does traditional media fit in?
I found an interesting article on the IAB site that displays advertising spending trends over a 13 year period. As no surprise, internet has been adapted much more rapidly than either broadcast or cable advertising. Definitely worth checking out. In 2007 Internet advertising has surpassed both Radio and Cable network ad spend.
So what will the future look like for the remaining top media providers? Here are some trends that I feel will negatively effect the penetration of traditional advertisers in the next 10-15 years:
- The Attention Economy – Gone are the passive zombies media bystanders. With TV on demand, video websites and Tevo, consumers now get what they what when they want, and commercials are not part of it!
- Newspapers – Great for regionalized penetration, but with no instant feedback, and a low traceableness, not to mention the lowing of readership, the skies look gray for the traditional printed newspaper.
What do you think the future of news paper and TV distribution is? Is is a good complement, or will it eventually disappear?
Facebook Consumerism?
Oct 29th
Microsoft’s recent $240 million investment into Facebook.com has resulted in a valuation of over 15 billion dollars for everyone’s favorite social networking app. Why so much? Do we honestly believe that the company has a business / revenue model that would warrant such a price?
Many people have speculated that Facebook’s advertising announcement on November 6th will pave the way to revenues for this darling social community, but what are they thinking? Are they planning on leveraging all of the profile and demographic information to allow advertisers to send targeted advertising messages? If they are, so what? Are people really open to advertising messages when their primary goal on the site is to communicate and “SuperPoke” their friends? Look was happened / is happening to Myspace.com, once the site became saturated and cluttered with advertising, it started to loose its key influencer user base and their growth stagnated.
What about add on apps, or widgets? There has been a lot of corporate buzz about buying your own widget, and companies such as Tripadvisor, eBay, Zoho, Jobster, and Blue Nile have all created or purchased existing apps. These widgets are used to complement the user experience on Facebook and to have banner ads or links back to the corporate site. But this whole process still needs to have a long tail marketing approach, users are there to communicate, if you don’t facilitate that, then your app will not survive.
How does this relate to the travel industry? Can a connection be made between travel experiences and face book? Would users be willing to share their experiences in a non-travel related site? How can a travel company effectively advertise or promote using this media?
There are 197 applications that attempt to bridge the gap between travel and the general online community. The sad thing for travel industry companies is that the most popular apps have the least functionality. The most active widget is one that allows you to have an image of a car on your page, and your car gets better with more points. This is followed by a number of apps that show a dot on a map or a flag from the countries that you have visited. You may speculate that this is a result of Facebook apps being in their infancy, and that greater functionality will follow, but that is not the case, there are some apps that are not popular that have a great list of features, one app Travel Map can:
“Plot your travels with this quick and easy tool and show the world how well-travelled you are. Brought to you by Travellerspoint, where you can also upload photos, start a blog and get all the travel help you need.”
This sounds mightily impressive until you realize that there are only 388 daily users.
What is the point?
If you are thinking about creating a widget for Facebook, keep it simple, complement the communication process, and give friends something to chat about. Have a soft ad, and link to your site through the widget. You may want to finish your development before November 6th, as there are going to be some BIG changes.