Millennial Dadvertising Opps: Best Western fills newly-created marketing role (Score 54)
Effective April 2021, 
hotel brand Best Western (BW) appointed Jay Hubbs as its first-ever advertising, marketing, innovation & analytics VP. Before his most recent position as H3 Trail Creek's principal, Hubbs served as the commercial services SVP at Remington Hotels, where his responsibilities included digital marketing. Now, he will focus on leading BW's digital advertising, media buying and co-op marketing. I expect this to lead its ad spend, especially via digital channels, to pick back up soon.
The company also raised $2.5m in a private equity round in September. This could also cause BW's spend to rise.
According to iSpot, this company hasn't invested in national TV since spending approximately $3.1m in Q1 2020; perhaps it will return to this channel under Hubbs's leadership.
Pathmatics reports BW has allocated roughly $137k toward digital ads YTD, a sliver of the roughly $1m it had allocated by this point last year. The company's estimated full-year 2020 spend of $1.4m only reached less than half of that of $4.4m in 2019. So far this year, it has earned around 30.1m digital impressions via Facebook (53%), desktop display (38%), Instagram (6%) and mobile display (3%) ads. Top site destinations for this year's desktop display ads have included reddit.com (35%), yahoo.com, youtube.com, hotels.com and cnn.com.
BW tends to target parents, especially dads and especially millennials. It targets business DMs as well as individual consumers. Of course, the company's spend won't pick up until the vaccine is more widely available and people start traveling more, but we will keep you updated. Per Kantar data, BW also invests in OOH, print and local broadcast.
Agency & martech readers - Get in touch soon to see what, if any, partnerships are available under the company's new VP. Of course, those with travel & hospitality expertise will have an upper hand. BW switched its media AOR duties from Initiative to PMG within the past year and a half or so, so you'll have better luck offering PR, creative, digital analytics and/or social media management work.
