Campaign Imminent: Booking Holdings DMs prepare for increases in demand, ad spend as COVID-19 vaccines become available
In their most recent earnings call, execs of Booking Holdings (BH) described that the company's decreasing spend will pick back up when consumers start traveling again with the safety offered by the coronavirus vaccine. BH's performance marketing channels remain active, and its marketing team has worked hard on campaigns and messaging that will roll out "when the time is right to encourage people to travel once again and use our services."
Leaders expect BH's spend to continue dropping YOY in Q1, so sellers able to help the company optimize its ROI with the limited advertising it's using should reach out.
BH appointed Sabrina Paz as its marketing assistant in January 2021. Since the company tends to hire marketing personnel specifically to oversee Priceline.com, Paz's hire will probably, eventually, affect ad spend for all of its brands.
View iSpot's approximations of recent TV commercial spend for BH's Priceline.com, Booking.com and Kayak brands here. Note that Priceline.com's spend via this channel is actually on the rise unlike that for the other brands. BH hasn't recently promoted RentalCars.com with TV commercials.
According to Pathmatics, the company has allocated roughly $2.6m toward digital ads YTD, a third of the roughly $7.5m it allocated within the same 2020 timeframe. BH's estimated full-year 2020 spend of $19.3m only reached less than half of that of $54.3m in 2019. So far this year, the company has earned around 285.2m digital impressions via desktop video (34%), Facebook (29%), Instagram (28%), desktop display (9%) and mobile display (1%) ads. 91% of this year's desktop video ads were placed site direct, primarily (27%) onto youtube.com.
As I briefly mentioned, reach out soon if you can help BH optimize the ROI from its dropping ad spend, and expect spend to pick back up as the vaccine continues to become more and more available. Remember that TV spend for Priceline.com is on the rise as that for other brands drops. From BH's heavy reliance on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram advertising, it's safe to say its traditionally parent-oriented target demographic currently skews strongly toward Gen-Z. To reach this audience, BH will likely eventually expand into additional digital channels such as OTT and/or podcast. Kantar data reports the company also invests in OOH (as of 2020), radio and local broadcast, though spend in these channels also significantly dropped in 2020, at least as of Q3. Remember that BH's marketing team has been working on campaigns that will debut within the coming months.
Agency & martech readers - This company doesn't show signs of upcoming agency reviews, so read elsewhere for more immediate opportunities. BH currently works with Ocean Media (media buying and planning AOR), Anomaly NY (creative AOR), Mindshare NY (media buying and planning assistance), Grip Limited (creative assistance) and H&S Communications (PR assistance).