If the advertising industry needed another excuse to obsess over travel data before Cannes Lions, Yahoo DSP’s Emily Ray just handed the industry a boarding pass. In an interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan ahead of next month’s “Flight to Cannes” with Kinective Media by United Airlines, Ray described travel signals as one of the richest sources of consumer intent available to marketers today.
Or, translated from adtech into plain English: if someone Googles “best beach hotels in July” at 1 a.m., the entire internet suddenly wants to sell them sunscreen, premium credit cards, digestive medicine and probably a linen shirt that costs more than airfare.
“We’re seeing travel moments show up in many different ways,” Ray said. “I would say that travel is the biggest form of intent that we see across the board on Yahoo.”
The platform sees consumers move through a compressed travel-planning cycle, with many summer travel searches now occurring in May and June even when trips happen in July, she said. That shrinking window has turned travel marketers into the digital equivalent of gate agents frantically calling final boarding.
“That window of time has condensed over the years,” Ray said. “With that condensed timeframe, it becomes that much more important for marketers to be able to reach the consumer at specific points in the journey in a very personalized way.”
Following travelers from search to suitcase
Ray outlined how Yahoo combines first-party data, real-time signals and its identity graph to help advertisers target consumers across devices and media channels. The pitch is classic omnichannel logic: the traveler searching flights on a phone is also watching connected TV, walking past digital billboards and probably doomscrolling airport weather delays somewhere in between.
“We have a wealth of first-party data,” Ray said. “We also have access to real-time signals. We also have a very strong identity graph that we use in combination in order to reach high-intent travelers.”
Naturally, the industry solution to this complexity is another identifier. Yahoo’s answer is Yahoo ConnectID, which Ray described as a proprietary identifier built from authenticated data that helps advertisers maintain continuity across channels. Because apparently the only thing traveling more than consumers this summer is their data trail.
Ray said the goal is to create advertising experiences that feel useful instead of intrusive. In adtech, this is roughly equivalent to a hotel guest hoping housekeeping knocks before entering.
“We work really closely with our advertisers to ensure that we are creating a seamless journey for the consumer so that they don’t necessarily feel the advertising,” Ray said.
Travel data escapes the travel category
One of the more revealing moments in the interview came when Ray described how non-travel brands are increasingly using travel behavior for targeting. That includes pharmaceutical marketers reaching frequent travelers with digestive-health products, based on the scientifically uncontroversial observation that airports, stress and questionable terminal sushi aren’t always friends of the human gastrointestinal system.
“We’re also seeing some really interesting use cases for non-travel brands using travel data,” Ray said.
Ray also noted that B2B marketers are increasingly targeting business travelers, since few audiences scream “premium enterprise software buyer” quite like somebody speed-walking through Terminal C while wearing loafers and rage-texting from an airline lounge.
Throughout the conversation, Ray repeatedly returned to the idea that timing and personalization matter more than broad demographic targeting. Showing travelers ads that match where they are in the journey is more effective than serving irrelevant promotions after the trip is already underway.
“If I am searching for a vacation destination, I’m going to be more apt to convert on an ad that’s showing me places that are more relevant to my search,” Ray said.
In other words, maybe stop serving Maui ads to someone already trapped in a middle seat flying home from Maui. The algorithms thank you.
You’re watching “The “Flight to Cannes”: How Passion and Purpose Fuels Travel and Media Impact, a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by Kinective Media by United Airlines. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
