Travel media company Adara has teamed up with Havas Media to bring hyper-targeted travel segments to advertisers.
Although the companies’ relationship dates back two years when they worked together on a Choice Hotels campaign, Adara CEO Layton Han said this partnership extends Havas’ access to first-party, travel audience data and analytics.
Havas is global agency of record for Dubai-based airline Emirates; Han said the agency is expanding its global travel client business, which could spell out more campaign clout for the company.
Adam Kasper, Havas Media North America CMO, noted conversion rates of up to four times higher on Choice Hotels and Emirates campaigns using Adara over other endemic travel sites. Adara maintains first-party data relationships with 70-plus travel suppliers, which Kasper identified as providing greater “reach” than some providers.
Adara’s relationship with Havas is not exclusive – the company said it works with “various” other agency holding groups.
“First-party data sets tend to be very deep, valuable and proprietary,” Han said. “The value of data is not just presenting the data itself, but [showing] why a campaign worked well. We’re able to provide deep analytics associated with the campaign and show which customers responded more than others.”
Travel and tourism isn’t the only industry seeking to provide unique targeting capabilities through closed-loop systems. Shopper data is also in demand. Both sectors have a lot of valuable information due to their tight relationships with consumers.
The data that suppliers house is proprietary and frequently kept from open exchanges, etc., so vertical-specific media companies are typically sparse and specialized. This is why online retargeters such as Sociomantic have teamed up with companies like Revenue Management Systems and Tesco to expand online ad targeting with CRM and loyalty program intelligence.
Adara, for its part, has expanded into social ad targeting through a beta Tailored Audiences partnership with Twitter.
“There continues to be a lot of interest with Twitter and the real-time messaging associated with it,” Han said. “We’ve seen a lot of interest there with travel advertisers who want to target on Twitter.”
Adara services numerous travel and tourism companies including Delta, Marriott and United by piping in CRM, loyalty and frequent flyer data in addition to meta-search, online travel agency and offline travel booking transaction data. Adara allows buyers and sellers to access non-personally identifiable first-party data, said Han, via its Audience Platform product.
The company claims access to a travel-attuned audience of 250 million unique monthly users, about half of which is US-based. For the sake of comparison, travel site Expedia.com’s media services division offers access to an active audience of 70 million monthly unique users.
Adara is increasingly seeing interest from other verticals too. Financial services is a growth area since the vertical tends to have strong relationships with travel and tourism companies (such as American Express and Delta). Han added retail, automotive and B2B advertisers are also showing interest in Adara.
