This is our wheelhouse — within the planning and shopping stages of travel. We create ad opportunities from the time someone decides to take a trip until the moment they book.
Our Travel Media Platform connects brands with active travel intenders precisely when they are open to suggestion. We walk a unique path in travel media, focused on the ad delivery mechanism, not just data profiles.
Display Can’t Do It Alone. It Takes A Village.
No single method of digital media adequately reaches your target. Which is why media mix is such a critical component to any ad campaign. Spreading out the risk has merit. Surrounding your target throughout the funnel with multiple ad products delivers results.
Corralling travel intenders can get chaotic and expensive if the reach methods are kept to a minor number of tactics. We’re thrilled to let you know profitable scale is not only possible but achievable. It just takes the right mix of media to make it real.
A New Approach
Mapping Ad Products to Pre-booking Activities
There’s a lot of places to run ads. We didn’t want to just be another one.
We wanted to understand how advertising impacts travelers. As you can imagine, setting out a course for comprehension is quite a departure from just trying to find smart placements.
We reverse engineered the pre-booking activities consumers exhibit leading right up to a purchase and isolated the behaviors where advertising can be presented. Then we poured over every type of digital media available and strategically selected an ad product that maps to those consumer behaviors.
Stroke of brilliance? Maybe. Effective? Definitely.
Products
We help travel marketers leverage more of digital then they realize is available to them.
The ad products we’ve assembled are a blend of strategic and tactical instruments interwoven specifically for the travel category. We operate under the premise that Big Data is valuable, but useless if your message is never seen.
The most important element of your campaign is getting your message in front of the target to influence their booking. That’s why our focus is on the method of ad delivery to the consumer.
We don’t claim magicianship or wizardry. But just maybe we’re the Yin to the travel consumer’s Yang.
Reach out for more details!
Trust Data Over Intuition
We’re not talking about Big Data. We’re talking about the proof, the evidence…the pudding. Algorithms can play their part. People can have their opinions. The facts should drive decision making. That’s why we combine machine and human intelligence.
When we say results come first, we’re not trying to be cliche. We know that pacing has its place. We dig algorithms. And we have our own opinions of media. We just believe nothing should come at the expense of performance.
Under the Hood
All we’ve done is run digital media campaigns for travel advertisers since 2002. We take that historical campaign data and expertise, map the best mix of publishers and placements, and couple it with your advertiser inputs to produce the best campaign results. The most subtle adjustments can make the biggest difference and we know which levers to pull and which buttons to push. It must be complex, look at the isometric illustration we needed to explain it!
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The Numbers
We all know brand safety is front and center. While there are many tools available to help protect you, few can say that they’ve been around for over a decade. Our longevity proves the relationships we cultivate are lasting. Numbers aren’t just numbers when you have the experience and long-standing partners behind them.
“When you find yourself on the side of the majority,
it’s time to pause and reflect.”
– Mark Twain
We’re contrarians by nature. We see a trend and try to find its source. We see a standard and want to challenge it. We hear about new software and we want to break it.
Our due diligence, insights and the ability to see five moves ahead is what lets us watch others come and go, while we continue to provide advertisers with repeatable success.
Publishers
We’re persnickety. Over 300 publisher relationships allow us to be picky when designing custom travel programs. This also affords us the ability to only admit publishers to our platform who meet our insanely high standards. Go ahead, ask them about us. They’ll say we’re a pain in the arse about performance.
We’ll freely admit there are pubs on our list that don’t look the part of how we hope a travel site is designed. But it’s not about quality of design – it’s about performance, period. And we know exactly which work for each category and brand.
We strategically leverage each pub for different reasons, crafting a custom program every time we run media. While numbers are important, it’s the blend of publishers that enhances our value.
Advertisers
More than 2,000 travel clients — that’s over 10,000 travel media campaigns. Whether you’re a DMO looking to drive more visitation, a cruise line needing higher fill on forward sailings, a hotel who needs to increase RevPAR or an airline trying to increase an O&D yield – we’ve been there. We’re travel industry veterans from Airlines, Hotels, OTAs and CVBs, and we’re passionate about two things: Travel and Digital.
Sometimes we write things others publish … #blushing
Our Story
In the early 2000s, we saw an unfulfilled need for travel advertisers to have a publisher that spoke their language. No, not Green Screens — but the lexicon only those in travel understand. The bevy of ad networks at the time were focused on other verticals and didn’t quite get the nuances of travel. And we felt our category deserved better representation in digital.
We’re born from travel companies like Airtran, Delta, US Airways, Kayak, Orbitz, Cheaptickets, Travelocity, Travelzoo, Hotwire, LastMinuteTravel and more.
We set the very first rate card for SideStep who would later be acquired and integrated into Kayak. We partnered with Trip Advisor during their startup mode to help widen their reach. Travel Spike created Travel Ad Network® in 2002 paving the way for others to dive deeply into a niche category rather than walk broadly into unfocused territory.
We’re former Revenue Managers, Travel Execs, Travel Marketers and Media Veterans. Finding the latest technologies/publishers and introducing them to the category is not only our passion, it’s placed us firmly in travel media lore.
Digital is our stage. Travel is our playground.