Steve Dunne, executive chairman of BrighterPR, says it is a watershed moment in tourism: “This year’s emergence of pure online brands moving into television marks a watershed moment in travel marketing.
TV Advertising Builds Credibility
“If you are on TV, you are a credible brand. The power of TV has never gone away; we have just got distracted by the internet over the past 10 years. says Dean Harvey, director at Designate advertising agency. He also commented that “digital brands had reached saturation point online. For the big online guys, it’s exponentially more expensive if someone finds you through a generic holiday term on Google than on a brand search, It could be £5 a click versus 20p.” So even though MGM and others are aligning more with digital video media like Tubi, broadcast TV is by no means dead. In fact it may be the big differentiation in the future as the digital world become more saturated.
The truth is that although digital media is flourishing “The power of TV has never gone away and being on TV creates great credibility for the brand. Television has been the domain medium for major brands and the travel adverting on TV are ta proven formula.
Threat to Established Brands
“Now, online players are injecting a new energy into the holiday proposition. They must move into the mainstream arena if they are to grow awareness and gain that all-important trust” said Dunne. “This presents a clear and present threat, and could erode the reputational advantage mainstream players have enjoyed in the past.”
A spokesman for Kayak said that Kayak had not previously invested significantly in UK TV media, but TV is now the “heavyweight and we have invested in a heavyweight multi-touchpoint launch for the UK,” he said. “We’ve started as we mean to go on.” Any TV campaign has stand out as Booking.com has done. It is a hard act to follow but one that seems inevitable for big brand travel marketing in 2106.
Growing Powerhouse of Creative Digital Media
The unexpected and unprecedented burst of agents TV advertising in 2016 Threatens Established Brands and may well shake up the industry but te competition on TV is really between the bigger brands mostly the established OTAs and chains seeing their initiatives being overtaken by smaller online agents. However, there are increasing opportunities for smaller travel companies.
Digital Video: Cost-effective & Innovative
On YouTube, the big travel brands often re-use their TV ads, but smaller hospitality brands you can create short video ads that are five to 10-seconds. Even 60 second video and longer that can be very cost-effective on YouTube and other video channels. One such innovation is the new http://YouTube.HolidayHotel.Reviews channel, a independent TV like media providing cost effective review review ads for hotel, tourism brands and destinations. The video ads are promoted on social media and in other digital formats. The reviews network even includes an online magazineand utilizes the new personality profiling technology that matches travelers with hotels of like character creating holidays that are very personalized. This technology was pioneered by holidays.barabados.org who are also making it available to other destination and hotel and tourism groups.
Travel Websites Become Multi-Channel Media With TV like quality
The newer travel website are becoming more TV like in the way they use video and story telling. Airbnb pioneered using full broadcast quality TV like Videos on the home age. The latest destination entry is Holidays.Barbados.org, which uses original high quality motion picture on its home page. Even small hotels are doing this, as in the case of the Saint Lucia Apartment Villa Resort at Poinsettia in the Caribbean Islands of St. lucia.
Hotel Finder was launched in 2011 and we have seen many upgrades since- The last video we did showed Google becoming more hotel friendly. Now it is looking like just another OTA.
Here is a picture of the new interface:
is hotel finder just another ota
Here is our previous 2015 video on Hotel Finder
In our previous MarkHat.com Update on Hotel Finder, we looked at the inevitable changes in advertising that underlie this move by Google. But adding bookings to hotels finder brings Google into direct competition with its largest customers, the OTAs. Get the details here >>>. The question we ask is that knowing current CPC ads are not the future for advertising is changing into an OTA the right strategy for search?
What we suspected for some time Google is adding commission based payment.Now Google adds bookings to its hotel finder paving the way for the worlds largest search engine to become the latest Online travel Agent (OTA).
It is clear that advertisers are demanding more accountability and the old pay for ads or pay for click is not the absolute measure. Ad managers have a hard time figure the ROI on a click. Commissions on the other hand are eminently trackable. And now its on line with Google. A bold move in that puts it in conflict their biggest customers the OTAS, who have long been afraid that Google will one day compete with them for delivering booking and not just leads to hotels and tourism operators. It is estimated that Expedia Inc and Priceline Group account for approx 5% of Google advertising income.
Googles Conflict with OTAs
This move is similar to the one by TripAdvisor which has been rolling out Instant Booking, that keep users within its interface using it preferred suppliers or partner systems for close the booking. Many OTAs have not played along with TA and Google will face similar challenges.
“None of the major US hotel chains appears to be participating in Google’s scheme so far — with only independents popping up in Tnooz searches. TripAdvisor has struggled, only landing Marriott, Choice and Accor so far.” ..Tnooz.
Sabre Hospitality Solutions, with more than 20,000 independent hotel customers added that
“We are powering the backend only for our hotel customers.”
As the Hotelmarketing Explains: “The Google Hotel Ads Commission Program combines the benefits and reach of Google Hotel Ads with the hotels’ existing commission programs by making the hotels’ best available retail rates searchable and bookable on Google. When travelers search for a hotel on Google Search, Google Maps or Google+, they will be able to select the property and rate they want, and then book the room directly with the hotel without ever leaving the page, reducing the abandonment rate commonly seen when consumers have to switch sites to complete a transaction.”
History of Google Hotel Finder
We will add a new video whowing the recent changes and its implications. The last update on hotelfinder is helpful in this contect.
Jeff Bullas has compiled a pile of amazing stats on what works in digital media. The research reveals surprising news on who are the social influencers. Shocking news really, and most of it very counter-intuitive.
He credits Technorati Media for some of these insights but his work reaches out to all social sites and blogs showing which have most influence on buying behaviors. Some of it is surprising; like Google only influences about 20% of purchases!
breakdown of digital influences
Did you know that consumers consider blogs as a prime influencer, right behind retail and brand websites? You could be forgiven for not knowing this, most brands don’t understand it either and spend very little on blogging channels. Social media is top of mind with everyone, but it accounts for just 10% of all digital advertising.
The top 3 include:
Display ads such as banner website advertising – 41%
Search advertising such as Google Adwords – 19%
Video advertising including YouTube – 14%
Total advertising spend on social media is just 10% of all digital ads and Facebook accounts for 57% of that. Blogs got only 5% of the entire social advertising budget.
Recent research by Forrester shows marketers spending less on Tweets as Twitter struggles with sagging growth. They believe Facebook and other other social media offer better returns As Elliot said. “It seems to have lost touch with marketers.”
Twiiter has now added several new features including its own video service; now we can upload videos direct to Twitter and get superior tracking and ad performance. In its study it found that “Users were 250% more likely to prefer auto-play videos over other viewing methods, including click-to-play, and 14% more likely to recall the videos they saw.” The company also says it will be working with top verification vendors like Nielsen and Moat to give advertisers confidence in their platform.
In tests, Twitter says the auto-play video feature has been well received among users and advertisers. Participating brands saw a 700% increase in completions of Promoted Videos. Now all that is included in the latest tweet options. But analysts say the changes are not enough and conclude that Twitter needs “more fundamental changes in order to survive.”
I still love twitter and my view has not changed since o wrote about #TwiterStayingAlive. Look its the only social site being indexed by Google, that alone is enough to keep it alive!
We know it is now clearly the age of visual communications. We have seen that our old sites with lost of content, but not a lot of visual content just are not as engaging as they used to be a couple of years ago. That’s why sites like the Barbados Tourism Encyclopedia are shifting to visualization mode with visual bookings and behavior responsive technology for marketing.
This presentation covers some really neat tools that will help anyone create engaging visual blogs and presentation. Check out products like Canva to build presentation that come alive – Some that are not mention are HauikuDeck
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