For several years, travellers around the world have been discovering all that the Middle East has to offer and, as a result, demand shows no signs of slowing down.
According to Sojern’s data, travel demand in 2023 to many MEA countries was up compared to pre-pandemic levels. In response, countries are making significant investments to attract new travellers and increase capacity.
To put their properties front and centre in travellers’ minds, Middle East travel marketers are pouring more resources into digital campaigns.
According to IAB MENA’s 2023 digital adspend results, MENA was the fastest growing region for ad spend in 2023, hitting $6.25 billion, an increase of 13.6 per cent compared to 2022.
But with a changing advertising landscape, such as the deprecation of third-party cookies, travel marketers must have the right strategies in place to ensure they’re getting return on their multi-billion-dollar investments.
Here’s how Middle East travel marketers can navigate cookieless changes to maximise digital adspend.
What will change after third-party cookies are deprecated?
Google has been talking about deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome since 2020.
While the dates have consistently been pushed back, it’s long been a hot topic of conversation. We discussed the implications of a cookieless world back in 2022, but the cookieless landscape has changed dramatically since then.
So what, exactly, will change once Chrome deprecates third-party cookies? Without third-party cookies, post-view attribution, targeting, and reporting will change and retargeting will be more challenging.
Why? Because marketers rely heavily on third-party cookie data, but soon a massive amount of that data will become inaccessible, leaving holes in marketing campaigns.
While these are certainly huge changes for marketers, the reality is they are driven by consumers’ need for privacy.
However, in spite of wanting privacy, consumers still want personalisation, which is something third-party cookies can’t provide.
Now, marketers must find new ways to retarget potential travellers. Curation, in particular, offers both, making it an even better alternative to third-party cookies.
What is curation?
Curation is when travel marketers and partners work with a supply side platform (SSP) to activate the packaging of data, audiences, and inventory to be pushed to their own demand side platform (DSP).
Many travel marketers have databases of customer profiles and preferences, searches, loyalty program information, and more.
This is all first-party data that has been collected with consent and is stored in a customer relationship management (CRM) system, which means it can be used even after third-party cookies go away.
With curation, partners can take that first-party data and pair it with their own data, such as Sojern’s billions of data points that show traveller intent, and cross-reference that information to find people on websites.
Here’s an example: If a traveller searches on a hotel website and visits a news website and gives consent to both to collect their information, curation technology acts as the middleman to figure out where there is overlap between the hotel’s database and the available ad inventory.
The marketing partner sees that the traveller gave consent to certain websites, including a news site, and then gives the travel marketer the option to purchase that impression to serve that traveller an ad on the news website. Once the marketer purchases the impression the traveller sees the ad.
Privacy and personalisation in one
What’s so great about curation? Curation not only adheres to privacy regulations, it also ensures that travellers get the personalisation they want.
Here’s why: Unlike third-party cookies, curation uses first-party data for retargeting, which means it’s highly accurate and shows travellers personalised ads.
In the past, travel marketers purchased impressions on the buy side, but with curation all transactions are done on the sell side, which retains privacy.
By selecting the audience ahead of the auction, the travel marketers only have access to the sell-side audience, which uses first-party data collected with consent. Since the transaction is completed directly through the publishers rather than the DSPs, curation doesn’t require this-party cookies.
All customer data is put into an escrow account during the transaction and, once complete, everyone removes their data.
This means customer data is never exchanged, so data marketers collect about their travellers is never revealed to a publisher, which protects traveller privacy while increasing personalisation.
What’s more, with curation, partners can stitch together multiple datasets and use AI to analyse these massive databases to better understand traveller preferences and build more targeted audiences.
For example, by building audiences around specific traits, such as travellers looking for luxury accommodations or all-inclusive holidays, marketers can better tailor messaging.
These built-out audiences can then be sent to any DSP, so those travellers will see ads with messaging that is relevant and will hopefully inspire them to complete their booking.
The Middle East is attracting massive amounts of new travellers. With curation, travel marketers can deliver beautiful, personalised ads that resonate–all without third-party cookies.
Not only does curation help travel marketers overcome several hurdles associated with the deprecation of third-party cookies, it also ensures that marketers can maximise return on their digital adspend investment to ensure their destination is top-of-mind for potential travellers.
By Stewart Smith, Managing Director, MEA at Sojern
