It’s a bird; it’s a plane; it’s a network of travel media networks.
On Wednesday, The Trade Desk expanded its relationships with a host of travel, hospitality and mobility-focused commerce media partners, including Uber Advertising, Booking.com, United Airline’s Kinective Media and MARRIOTT MEDIA. (That’s how it’s branded, and Marriott refers to it as “Riot Media.”)
The news is primarily a go-to-market push and reconfiguration of existing partnerships within a network of networks as opposed to a net-new set of tools or functionalities.
The idea here is to get the word out, Jeff Daniel, The Trade Desk’s GM of retail data partnerships, told AdExchanger, and help travel-related commerce media networks “monetize these revenue streams more at scale.”
Travel companies typically only work with a small network of holistic brand partners. Pepsi, for instance, is a product carried across Marriott chains, and Pepsi was a pilot advertiser when Riott Media launched last year. Marriott is a hospitality partner for the Formula 1 racing league, and the “F1” movie starring Brad Pitt last year was another early Riott Media advertiser.
Where The Trade Desk comes in is by opening up travel and hospitality data to a wider range of advertisers that wouldn’t instinctively think to run marketing inside hotels, across online travel sites or within other travel environments, Daniel said.
“Sometimes we discover that those advertisers and agencies are unaware of the value that some of these data sets bring,” he said.
The self-serve leap
To meet that demand and make their data easier to buy, some commerce media partners are changing how they work with The Trade Desk, although the underlying capability isn’t net-new for the DSP.
Riot Media, for example, launched last year as a managed service using TTD’s pipes, but will now support self-serve campaigns on its platform.
Previously, Riot’s advertisers could create custom audience segments and activate them through The Trade Desk. If, say, a brand wants to reach men who travel for business and have also booked vacations for golf in certain geographies, that’s a custom audience they could create with Riott Media and dish to TTD.
However, managed service means that there’s a degree of separation. Advertisers didn’t know which individual users were Marriott Bonvoy members – Marriott’s loyalty program is the backbone of Riott Media’s identity graph – and couldn’t connect those impressions to other ads across the web.
With a self-serve model, the audience segments are prepackaged and therefore less personalized, but those impressions can be reconciled across the open web through TTD. And instea d of just getting a conversion count tied to Riott Media data, advertisers can now see which impressions reached Marriott customers and connect those IDs to other impressions where perhaps Riott Media data wasn’t applied.
“We wanted to be where advertisers are [already] working and make it easy for them,” said Chris Norton, SVP and GM of marketing capabilities, Marriott International. That thinking is what led to Marriott’s decision to let advertisers access its data on a self-service basis.
Norton’s empathy with marketers is unsurprising, considering he was on the Marriott marketing team until a year and a half ago. “I shed the paid media part of the job to help build this out,” he said.
Booking.com is another travel media business in TTD’s new network, although it remains managed service only and is unlikely to make the jump to self-service data sales.
“That’s not the game that we are playing today,” said Ben Harrell, Booking.com’s managing director is the US. “That’s not the game I anticipate us playing.”
What’s important about its managed service work with TTD, Harrell said, is that it allows the company to extend its data beyond its properties and other narrow channel partners, such as restaurant-booking-service OpenTable.
He added that The Trade Desk’s broader network of travel and hospitality partners – not to mention other retail media or TV companies integrated with the DSP, which Harrell referred to as “premium inventory ecosystems” – also represent an opportunity for Booking.com’s partner growth.
But advertisers and agencies that aren’t endemic Booking.com or Marriott advertisers are also looking for new ways to reach customers, Daniel said. In some channels, brands have already maxed out on reach and they need to find net-new eyeballs elsewhere.
Advertisers are “trying to step outside the inertia they’ve been living within,” he said. And this demand for new audiences is attracting more data and inventory suppliers, such as TTD’s network of travel companies.
“It’s beyond just traditional retail now,” Daniel said. “A lot of these other quote-unquote ‘commerce companies’ are starting to ask the question, ‘How can I bring value to the marketplace?’”
