Advertisers, Take Flight: Travel Brands Are Ready For Take Off. First Stop, Connected TV.

3 Min Read

Every year, millions of sports fans tune into the nation’s biggest sporting event, the “Big Game”—it also draws attention from the biggest advertising agencies and brands as they battle it out to top the rankings of best commercial, which makes headlines across media publications the morning after. This year, one trend ensued: travel, in all its forms, is back. Think road trips, air travel, hotels and more—brands like Kia, Bookings.com, General Motors, BMW and more are looking back to pre-pandemic times and encouraging Americans to venture out to the great outdoors after being put on pause.

“Brands Pay Attention to the Mood of the Country When They Plan.”

Forbes said it best: “The trends in Super Bowl commercials tend to reflect the mood of the country. You don’t want to take a chance on your ad falling flat when you’ve paid a record $6.5 million for the spot,” said media reporter Toni Fitzgerald. Following two years of isolation and reflection, this year’s ads took on a sunnier disposition—and a theme of escapism—tapping into the consumer mindset of favoring experiences over products as supply chain challenges continue to plague the retail industry.

After a hiatus, travel advertisers are once again increasing their investment in digital advertising, and though it has yet to reach pre-pandemic levels, it’s set to increase by more than double from 2020 to 2023.

Is the Journey More Important Than the Destination?

Nowadays, travel advertisers are looking beyond serving bite sized content on a small-screen scale like Instagram’s IGTV. If they only focused their video efforts there, they would be sorely disappointed (Digiday attests that the platform is currently underwhelming many publishers as a source of revenue). Nailing down that perfect ratio of digital channels is one challenge, delivering on KPIs is another. However, a recent MediaRadar report from the past year revealed that travel advertisers are spending more on TV ($1.08 billion) than on digital ($793.48 million) as they turn to television as both a brand and performance marketing tool. However, there’s a better way to advertise on television than most brands know—and that’s not through linear TV.

Travel advertisers commonly share three pain points: tracking hotel bookings, tracking hotel revenue and tracking arrivals. Connected TV advertising platforms like MNTN overcome all three of these challenges, and exist as an end-to-end solution to help leading travel brands streamline the media buying process by cutting down creative production without sacrificing scalability (case in point, check out some creative examples from Away and TripAdvisor here). Travel brands can re-engage viewers via targeted ads served across premium networks and have a view of performance in real time throughout their campaign, down to the decimal point. We think it’s solid proof that both the journey and the destination can be all things equal, especially where digital advertising is concerned.

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