Retail media is on fire. And it seems like every company wants to fan the flames.
For several years, Marriott dipped only a cautious toe in the commerce and retail media space. “It’s an attractive business,” Marriott SVP of Marketing, Data Activation & Personalization Chris Norton told AdExchanger. (“We’re changing my title,” he added.) But the hospitality behemoth wanted to ensure that if and when it opted into the ad biz, its results would be “additive to the guest experience and the travel journey.”
Ultimately, Marriott decided that it did want in.
In June, the company launched a new media network called Marriott Media (stylized as MARRIOTT MEDIA, inexplicably), designed to connect its customers to relevant brands throughout the travel process.
Target practice
Marriott may have a new organization dedicated to advertising and data, but it’s built on a preexisting structure. The company has done ad sales, though restrained more to its own properties, like TVs or signage at hotels, rather than across the web, CTV and socials.
Also, Norton previously worked on “data activation and personalization” for Marriott’s own marketing, he said. Now, he’s applying the same processes to the media network on behalf of Marriott’s clients.
Ultimately, Marriott looked at over 200 targetable attributes it attaches to visitor profiles, such as hobbies, travel habits and geography of a customer’s stay. The company’s loyalty program and advertising identity spine is called Marriott Bonvoy, and Norton said it has more than 230 million members.
On the advertiser side, Marriott looked at the geographic location of specific hotels and the economic tiers of its brand partners to determine which audience segments are best suited for a given advertiser.
The targeting can get hyper-specific, too. Marriott can personalize a message to “a specific guest with a certain preference, within a certain hotel, within a certain brand,” Norton said, like targeting fans of Beyonce with ads for her beauty brand and news about her tour dates while they’re in town for her show.
’Round the world
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Some of Marriott Media’s ads are directly on Marriott properties, like in-room TVs featuring restaurants or activities in the area. Multiple mall operators are early ad partners. And Marriott Media has placements across its digital platforms, too, like its app and website, and on Facebook and Instagram.
Marriott also has a partnership with The Trade Desk, providing access to a “wide swath of different publishing sites,” said Norton.
Although, even with its Trade Desk integration, any advertiser using Marriott’s first-party data for targeting or attribution must work directly with the media network. “You can’t just go to The Trade Desk and pull up a Marriott audience,” he said, because the chain wants to control and curate messages that are targeted to its customers.
Most of Marriott Media’s clients are already major partners of Marriott, like PepsiCo. The ads aren’t a “formal endorsement,” of those brands, said Norton, but a collaboration. And the ads aren’t framed as being “brought to you by Marriott, or Riot Media,” he added.
The ads focus on the partner’s brand, said Norton, rather than co-promoting the two companies. “But it’s our targeting and our data fueling that.”
Better together
Getting access to Marriott’s data is one of the main reasons that PepsiCo decided to work with Marriott Media for the launch earlier this year of a new Gatorade campaign, Scott Finlow, global CMO for PepsiCo Foodservice, told AdExchanger.
With Marriott’s first-party data, PepsiCo could determine audiences that would be a good fit for its on-the-go messaging or might be open to a message about the importance of hydration while traveling. It found that two Bonvoy audience segments – business travelers and fitness enthusiasts, unsurprisingly – had the most overlap with Gatorade’s audience in terms of consumption habits, travel journeys and exercise habits, and brought in incremental new shoppers.
“Our role in away from home,” said Finlow, “is to understand the consumer journey through when they dine, when they play, when they travel.”
The partnership with Marriott Media was the first time that PepsiCo was able to engage with its audience in a “more holistic way,” Finlow said, throughout the funnel – reaching people everywhere from broad targeting in restaurants to personalized ads in their hotel rooms.
He described Marriott Media as a “new frontier” for PepsiCo.
And Marriott sees it the same way.
“We refer to it as ‘Riot Media,’” said Norton, when asked about the network’s unconventional name and stylization. The name Marriott is “synonymous with travel,” he said, “but we also knew we wanted to sort of disrupt the commerce media space, and that name implies that as well.”
One thing is for sure – it’s certainly disruptive.
