The interesting idea behind Travel Ad Network

A few weeks ago I saw that Travel Ad Network had purchased travel inspiration website Travelmuse. That Eye for Travel story announcing the acquisition was interesting as it quoted Travel Ad Network (TAN) saying their intention was to spend their recently raised $15 million on building the largest online travel audience in the world.

Dennis Schaal at Tnooz then took it a step further when he wrote:

Brian Silver, the TAN president and CEO, cites several reasons for acquiring TravelMuse’s assets, but chief among them is that the site provides an effective means to ascertain the attributes of travel consumers early on in the travel-buying funnel. TAN already is a buyer of such consumer data, and the TravelMuse acquisition enables TAN to harvest a whole bunch more and for free, Silver says. Accessing that data about traveler intent is much more important to TAN than the current size of the TravelMuse audience, Silver says. TAN can turn around and leverage that data about consumer attributes for its publishers and advertising partners, he adds.

And this is getting to the heart of why it is interesting. The other day I mentioned some of the cutting edge work both Google and Microsoft are doing in next generation targeted advertising technologies, and today I saw something in Advertising Age about new technology from personalization software vendor Rich Relevance for placing targeted ads near the checkout of e-commerce merchants. Make no mistake, in some shape or form these types of technologies will make their way into travel, and maybe Travel Ad Network see themselves as being able to capitalize on this trend by matching it all to great information on what customers are thinking of buying before they actually purchase. Whoever can predict the center of the Bow Tie from a position to the left of the knot will take a lot of power away from the airline direct channel. Not only for the air segment, but maybe even more significantly it will negatively impact the airline’s ability to generate ancillary revenue.

One airline trying to move to the left of the Bow Tie is Delta with their just launched Embark inspiration product for the Google Chrome browser. I played with it for about 20 minutes today and it has quite a nice design; I also liked the way destinations could be filtered by weather conditions using a slider – see below what I wrote way back in January when discussing airlines wanting to own travel inspiration.

Much better attributes would be things that could interact with a slider, and that also could be populated with data sources that were automatically updated rather than manually maintained. Average temperate at that time of the year, chance of rain, days of sunshine, water temperature – or maybe something really edgy like safety (aka muggings/murders per head of population) or even average age of other people that flew to this destination

But the most interesting part for me when using Embark was seeing the large banner ad at the bottom of the screen offer advertising slots on the site, sold by the Delta in-flight magazine sales team. OTA’s have managed to mix a transactional revenue model and a media model, are airline websites next?

 

Is nudge marketing about to get even bigger?

I’ve started thinking about making some new predictions for 2011, but still haven’t finalized the list. One thing I have noticed is that I seem to get a bit of search engine traffic for people searching on the phrase “nudge marketing.” First time I used it here was when I was making my 2009 predictions although I recall using the term prior to this and even was under the impression at one point that I may have invented it. Almost certainly not true, but I didn’t consciously rip it off from anyone else.

So apart from the search engine traffic, what has got me thinking about nudge marketing today – well two things actually, and both of which I saw earlier in the day.

The first comes from Google – here it is:

The idea is to push information to people. It’s location in context. Inside the browser and a toolbar, can we look at where people have been going on the web — then we deliver it. But it’s a big UI challenge. In the browser it might be a panel on the right or bottom that complements your browsing. On the mobile phone, it’s where you are in the physical world. We can figure out where the next most useful information is. In a restaurant maybe it’s a menu. Or maybe it’s a social menu. It’s about explicit and implicit location.

The second comes from a new Microsoft invention. They plan to read through your online photo albums, interpret the context of your photos and then maintain a profile of what you like, where you are etc by the photos you are posting. And then serve ads to you based on this contantly updated profile that they maintain. I would have thought this was impossible not that long ago, but only yesterday I uploaded a 10 minute family video to YouTube that contained about 20 seconds background music from Jamiroquai only to be amazed a few minutes later to receive an automatic email with the following;

Your video… may have content that is owned or licensed by Sony Music Entertainment.

In the past I wrote a couple of long posts on the future of travel search, but the more I am thinking about it, one of my 2010 predictions keeps coming back to me – Data will transform travel. And this data is driving one prediction that I know will be somewhere on the list – personalization will take over from mobile and social as the travel industry buzzword for 2011.

 

Personalization put into practice – Mobile, Website, CRM and the mystery fourth ingredient

The title is a little provocative, but as I mentioned yesterday, I’ve recently been invited to speak at Eye for Travel’s Customer Centric Strategies for Travel conference in Atlanta in late January, and it is the title I have chosen for my presentation. I’d be interested to hear any guesses on what the fourth mystery ingredient might be.

Today’s post is more a round-up of various things, but without a common theme. Alaska Airlines put out an announcement yesterday about a wide range of new management appointments at the airlines, but this is the one that caught my eye.

Curtis Kopf has joined Alaska Airlines as managing director of alaskaair.com and customer innovation. Kopf has more than 20 years of experience leading communications efforts, e-commerce programs and successful teams at other companies. He comes to the airline from Microsoft, where he was responsible for 12 global websites. He’s also held senior positions in e-commerce site management and merchandising at Microsoft and spent several years in a similar capacity at Amazon. Kopf earned a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a master’s from Johns Hopkins University.

Is there a trend starting for airlines to hire e-commerce managers from outside of the airline industry? He is certainly not the first recent appointment in the US to a role like this from a non airline background. Maybe it is an acknowlegement that airline websites need to be looking outside of the aviation industry for sources of innovation?

Last night I attended a function at the offices of Edelman on the topic of social media in travel. An interesting evening, especially the presentation from John Peters of Tripology talking about the sale of that business to Rand McNally and how he used social media to generate a bidding war for the company. Also intersting to see people in the crowd hanging off every word spoken by Dave Armano – not that that is such a bad thing as no doubt he knows his stuff. It was good talking to him afterwards as it is fascinating how much it breaks the ice when it turns out you know someone in common – in this case Anne Bartlett-Bragg of social business consultants Headshift. Actually I know her husband Stephen better, and last I heard they were getting some good traction in Asia-Pac for their consulting business which is now part of Dachis Group.

And here is a final piece that I never got around to writing about, but that seems to fit in well today when I am writing on no theme in particular. Back at the Phocuswright conference in Arizona recently I hosted a dinner for 12 people in a private dining room with the theme Three Years in Three Minutes. Each person in attendance had to speak for three minutes over dinner on one key trend or technology that would have a major impact in online travel in the next three years. Apart from myself I had the following people in attendance.

• Erin Hull, Delta, General Manager, e-commerce Strategy
• Nathan Holm, US Airways, Director of Online Marketing, Business Technology Delivery
• Oli Dervey, Aeroplan, Strategy & Innovation
• Timothy O’Neil-Dunne, T2 Impact, Managing Partner
• Andy Newman, British Airways, Manager, ba.com & Mobile Channels
• Scott Ahlsmith, 23TouchPoints, President
• Frank Grasso, e-channel search. Founder & CEO
• Renata Tilkian, South African Airways, Director Sales Development, Online Channels
• Tim Hughes, Orbitz, VP Commercial HotelClub, Hotel Services Asia Pacific
• Denis Lacroix, Amadeus, VP Development - Sales & e-commerce platforms
• Pierre-Louis Chouette, Amadeus, Business Development - Online Travel Agencies

And the topics chosen for their informal presentations (not in the same order as above, just to maintain some confidentiality)

• The coming war between Search and Personalization
• I’m a commodity…Get me out of here
• From HK1 to 1:1 – the power of converging travelers’ preferences with their historical travel purchases to better understand, predict and influence their purchasing behavior by delivering one meaningful recommendations
• Finding customers in fragmented media
• Delivering relevant targeted offers and products to the right customer at the right time
• The future of authority in search
• Personalize and contextualize, or risk becoming marginalized
• Pre-shopping solutions are tools best used in an advertising model and SEO process
• The increasingly blurred line between pre-shopping and shopping
• Personalized travel through mobile
• Extending the Direct Channel: Engaging Mobile Content at the Destination
• Creating loyalty through data-driven marketing instead of miles and freebies

Regular readers of this blog might guess my topic as being  The increasingly blurred line between pre-shopping and shopping, but at the end of the night eveyone voted on which presentation was the best and despite votes beiong cast for seven different presenters, the winner with three votes was Tim Hughes.

Dave Armano and I were last night talking about the importance of ensuring you enjoy what you do for work, and I can definitely say that doing things like hosting that dinner at Phocuswright really helps to keep my job fun. The positive feedback from so many of the guests afterwards was just the icing on the cake.

 

Social media in travel, tonight in Chicago.

Tonight I’ll be attending a function hosted by Edelman at their downtown Chicago office. As the invitation says, This is going to be a series of a few fast paced presentations followed by a group discussion on the latest trends in Social Media, focusing on Social Media Strategy. I’ll try to do a post event write up here in the next few days.

Presenters are

• John Peters, VP/GM of Tripology/Rand McNally & Moderator of the Meetup
• David Armano, SVP – Digital, Edelman Chicago
• Abby Ross, VP Marketing – Always Be Social
• Krista Parry, Director of Marketing & Communications – Park City Mountain Resort

If your job touches on social and you don’t know of Dave Armano’s blog then be sure to take a look, but the others on the roster for tonight are less well known to me.  Some of the topics they are promising to cover  are

1. Influencing bloggers to tell your story
2. Setting the right goals, resources and budget to get started properly and effectively
3. Social Media and ROI
4. How to align goals with metrics

And speaking of upcoming engagements, I’ve just accepted an invitation to speak at the Eye for Travel Customer Centric Strategies for Travel conference being held in Atlanta in late January. That one sounds like an interesting event, so take a look at the agenda and see if it is relevant for your job. I’ve come up with a good title for my presentation, so now I’ve just got to make sure the content is as interesting as the title! More on that in a few days.

 

Geogaming in travel and the MINI Stockholm example

Recently in the article titled When social, mobile, location and every other buzzword come together I was praising Vail ski resort for launching what is probably the most targeted social travel-related tool I have seen to date; but at Phocuswright in Arizona earlier this week I was sitting in a presentation by Pete Stein from Razorfish where he showed an example from Sweden that really impressed me – at least insomuch as it comes to targeted geo-gaming and using this as a way to get people engaged with a brand. Watch the short video below.

Seeing that ad I was reminded of writing back in April about geo-gaming being one of the five untapped opportunities for mobile and travel. I’m still waiting to see something as compelling as the MINI example from someone in the online travel space – now if I have seen that at the Travel Innovation Summit I might have even put my hand in my own pocket to back it!

And whilst talking of the Travel Innovation Summit, let’s try and tie that to Expedia in two ways.

Firstly, if you were there you might remember a company called TrustYou doing quite an interesting pitch on semantic search and trying to help their customers understand the intent of a reviewer rather than just focusing on keywords alone. So I was interested to see the following title to a story in Eye For Travel a couple of days later: Expedia to evaluate sentiments expressed in text collections.

The second tie in is that I was supposed to be having dinner with Mobiata CEO Ben Kazez and a group of others on the evening of the Travel Innovation Summit, but on the day before he pulled out saying he was no longer coming to Phocuswright. He told me something important had come up, but didn’t elaborate. Later that evening I was talking to Tim Hughes and we were both wondering what could possibly cause someone to pull out of such an important conference at short notice.

A couple of days later during the conference Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced they were buying Mobiata! Congratulations to Ben and the team, as for a company that was only formed a couple of years ago, selling to Expedia is a phenomenal exit. And I also think that qualifies as a pretty justifiable excuse for pulling out of a dinner engagement with me at short notice.

 

Tnooz: Awards from Phocuswright that you may not want to win

The Phocuswright conference is over and most people (me included) are now far from the Phoenix/Scottsdale area. Hopefully life will settle down a bit over the next week and I’ll find time to write a few pieces on some key takeaways from the conference. In the meantime, if you want to read some of my thoughts from the first day of the conference, I did find time to submit a post to Tnooz with the title: The Tnooz Alternative Travel Innovation Summit Awards.

But be warned, parts of it are somewhat provocative and not everyone will like everything I have written.

 

United Airlines and a bit of time travel for PhoCusWright in Arizona

Phocuswright the week after next is shaping up to be a great event. I’m looking forward to catching up with a lot of readers of both this blog and of my work on Tnooz whilst I am there – if I get there.

It was only recently that I reviewed parts of the United.com booking flow, and whilst some of what I saw I liked, nothing would compare to the actual flight if they really can transport me back in time. Take a look at the pre-departure reminder email that I just received, and pay very close attention to the arrival date, both going and returning.

On June 3rd last year I was still living in Madrid, but assuming I do make it to Arizona at some point in the present, I am looking forward to Tuesday 16th and seeing all of the companies presenting in the Travel Innovation Summit. My own employer Amadeus (more time travel?) will be one of the 34 companies demonstrating, but it is not a product that I am personally involved with. Some of the other companies I’m also interested in seeing (although I’m sure there will be at least one not on this list that also ends up impressing me) are tripalertz, e-channel Search, Goby, Hipmunk, Lixto, gogobot, Kony Solutions, Kukunu, Bonvoy and Voyavo. For a full list of all the innovators under the spotlight, click here.

If you are attending the conference and haven’t already been in touch but would like to set up a meeting, I’m very open to hearing from you and finding out more about what you do and why it will change the online travel landscape.

 

Tnooz: When social, mobile, location and every other buzzword come together

Take a look at the four minute video below from Vail ski resort in Colorado. If you are interested to know why I was impressed with it you can read my latest contribution to Tnooz.

But as I said at the end of the Tnooz piece, when am I going to get the chance to test it out in person?

 

Google updated lead time and sites searched data remain pretty consistent

Things have been a bit slow on this blog recently, but you can take that as meaning I’ve been pretty pre-occupied elsewhere. Part of it being preparing for Horizons in San Francisco next week, but a lot more than that as well.

Last week Google ran their Think Travel invitation only event in New York, and I know of a few people that attended.  Long time readers will remember my Bow Tie model data which relied heavily on Google numbers showing an average of 22 travel sites visited over 12 sessions in 47 days prior to the travel booking being made.

The latest Google numbers shown at the conference last week show very little change. Twenty two travel sites is still being used as a statistic, but the number of searches is now being claimed as 9.5 on average prior to booking. I did not see any reference to the lead time prior to booking (previously 47 days), but I was speaking to someone today who was trying to make a case for mobile apps having the potential to significantly reduce the booking window, especially in non air.

I’ll wait for the data, but on the face of it, it might be true?

 

The travel industry as teacher not student in social media

So often we hear stories about what the travel industry can learn from other industries when it comes to customer experience and implementing online technologies, so it was nice to see something recently taking the opposite stance. I’ve selected a few relevant paragraphs from the article in Hospitality Times.

The report cites numerous airlines, including AirTran, Delta, Southwest, United, and Virgin America, that use Facebook and Twitter to make last-minute offers, announce fare specials, or just keep passengers informed about delays and weather conditions. Hotel chains like Carlson’s Country Inns & Suites, Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott also actively use Facebook and Twitter to communicate and, more importantly, to keep customers involved. Hyatt’s Twitter account serves as a “virtual concierge,” allowing guests to ask and receive answers to inquiries and requests about the hotels and the areas surrounding them. Some travel providers are going even further by getting into location-based services. InterContinental, for example, is using Topquest to offer customers loyalty points simply for showing up at any hotel, restaurant or bar operated by the hotel chain. The gimmick is that the customers are required to alert friends on Facebook Places or Foursquare.

So what can online marketers learn from the social media experience of the travel industry according to Hospitality Times?

1. Social media has moved well beyond casual friend-to-friend connections into the realm of legitimate usage as an important communications channel for business.
2. Adding social media to the media mix is a good strategic move for a time-sensitive, highly competitive business, where it can be used to disseminate late-breaking news and make last-minute offers.
3. Using social media for its generational appeal – to reach a younger demographic that’s more socially connected – is smart, but not to the exclusion of other media that may have broader applications to diverse age groups. It’s important to know your audience and utilize the specific media channels that they embrace.
4. Figuring out ways to leverage location-based services, if they’re relevant to your business, can create new opportunities to drive customers and their friends to local establishments.

Earlier this week I made a reference to Tripit and how over 20% of Google employees are registered with this itinerary sharing service, but what I had meant to add at that time was a comment on privacy. I was pushing Tripit to work with Linkedin years ago, but now I’m becoming a bit more wary of sharing my itinerary data – I don’t always want everyone to know which airlines I am visiting, and seeing which city I am in pretty much gives the game away. 

Which leads me to changes Google have recently made to Orkit. I’ll finish with the video below, as it seems like Google are thinking along similar lines - social is great, but it needs to kept in context. I might share my itinerary with work colleagues, but sometimes I don’t want to share this with every person within my Linkedin network. That network contains journalists, competitors and others for whom this information is not always appropriate. Great contacts, and people I enjoy keeping in touch with, but this leads to me underutilizing the benefits from both Linkedin and Tripit because I am now uploading fewer and fewer travel itineraries.