07 May 2009

Travelmole Guest Comment: Why online advertising is crucial for the travel trade

Danny Brooks, project director for brik digital, explains why travel companies should not be backing away from online advertising.

Consider the following facts:

1. The number of serious internet users (those most likely to buy a holiday) jumped from 12 million in 2007 to 15.3 million last year - a 28% increase;

2. Time spent online by consumers is now second only to TV watching and is way ahead of other media like radio, magazines and newspapers;

3. UK online advertising expenditure (not surprisingly, given the facts in 1 and 2 above) reached a staggering £3.35 billion last year, a leap of over 17% from 2007, while all other forms of advertising either stagnated or declined.

So canny advertisers are taking advantage of this huge shift in public use of the internet in order to reach buying audiences. But not, apparently, the travel trade. There was actually a decline in travel online advertising spend in 2008.

So why has travel backed away from the modern method of persuading consumers to book holidays?

Gary Jacobs, CEO of destination marketing company, Fox Kalomaski, believes: "Travel marketing budgets are down overall, dragging digital with them. And let’s face it, a lot of marketers also find the new online methodology difficult to understand and evaluate. It’s a bit of a culture shock and therefore a barrier to development. But it seems to me that a more professional approach would be to examine more seriously those parts of the marketing budget that deliver the best value and concentrate financial resources accordingly. An increase in travel online spend would then be inevitable."

With home Internet use three times that of the work place, who are all these millions of online visitors? Well, the internet user population is spread roughly equally across all social-economic and age groups, including a significant and rising number of over-55s. But it’s worth advertisers exploiting specific phenomena such as the fact that women aged 24 to 35 spend more time online than men, for example.

And attitudes towards advertising encountered on the internet are pretty positive, resulting in £46 billion spent via the medium in 2007. Also, in practical terms, consumers reveal that what prompts the purchases that produced this enormous figure are promotional emails and online advertising.

Moreover, online users also say that the biggest motivator for all this activity and expenditure is to research information, with the greatest use of the Internet being visits to sites where consumers can buy.

So you could say that to advertise online at the same time is to push at an open door.

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I was impressed, until....

'Agree to initiate' [a sustainability programme]... what about agree to initiate, develop, implement and achieve? OK, I'm not trying to 'knock' this, only we've been aware of Sustianability since 1987 and the Brundtland Report [World Commission on Environment and Development]...a full thirty years and only NOW do we start actively thinking about 'initiating'??!!! That said, one has to laud such positive TUI activity... until now we have been in a classic Catch 22: (Consumers) 'We can only buy what they sell, basically, and they are not selling sustainable products' and (Suppliers)'We sell what sells and buyers aren't actively demanding sustainable products so we don't rack them'. Finally we are moving out of the impasse...but it has taken us thirty years to get here. Listening to many of the climate change experts: Stern, Lovelock, Lynas and Monbiot, the luxury of 'time' to address the problem has pretty much run out....

By Tom Allen, Thursday, May 7, 2009