Josh Beckwith, VP of Corporate Sales at Sojern, shares his view of curation and the use of data in travel advertising at ATS 2024.
I think having a verticalized approach is a real strength for our business. So many of the platforms and solutions are built to work across verticals—whether it's cars, chocolate bars, flights, or all sorts of other industries. They work really well in the media space, but what we really believe in for travel, having been in the industry for 17 years, is that we bring the best of the technology sector, the platforms, and the data, and we make it truly relevant to our industry. When you look at travel, you're talking about airlines, hotels, cars, cruises, destinations, attractions—it's actually a really massive vertical. It deserves its own specialized approach.
What we bring to it is a technology layer that’s built around the specific requirements, KPIs, conversion rates, creative types, and audiences that our customers need to reach. More importantly, from Sojern's perspective, we bring a verticalized data point of view.
We partner with data providers all over the world—from online travel agencies, metasearch companies, airlines, and hotel chains—to build a deep, long-term understanding of traveler behavior throughout the journey. This includes their path to purchase, their actual buying habits, and even what happens between the purchase and arrival. All of that knowledge and intelligence about travel, combined with a specialist proprietary tech stack built on DSPs, SSPs, and more, allows us to help our travel advertisers make the most of the adtech and martech landscape.
Curation is obviously the word of the day—it seems to be on everyone’s tongue. We’ve been really active in curation for about 18 to 24 months now. What we’re bringing to the table is the ability to layer our data into the inventory space, which is new and unique for us. We’ve been working on porting our data into the DSP side, which comes with its own challenges. You need to data-match, have all the identifiers linked, and do a lot of groundwork. It’s hard to decentralize that. It’s also difficult for us to provide our data into a third party’s DSP due to data use rights, privacy protection, and other considerations.
What curation is allowing us to do is build really interesting bespoke audiences and connect them with inventory on the sell-side, where match rates are significantly better. These higher match rates allow us to build much more scale. That scale leads to better performance, which we can then pass along as a PMP to our agency or advertising partners.
This approach has driven massive growth for us this year. We’re doing a ton of bespoke work. For instance, if an airline wants point-to-point targeting, from origin A to destination B, we can uniquely curate an inventory set around people planning that specific travel. Or, if you’re looking for a particular persona—such as the luxury traveler, the family traveler, or the business traveler—we have extensive data assets to combine and target those audiences. We can even overlay intelligence into inventory selection: understanding where travelers are spending time on websites and aggregating inventory based on the path to purchase.
Overall, the curation space is enabling us to explore a wealth of exciting, iterative audience opportunities for our clients. We’re seeing a ton of strong performance as a result.
Yeah, so AI is a big piece. When we talk about curation, we need to build a ton of audiences. At the moment, we’re creating up to 100 bespoke audiences a week for our curation clients. That requires AI. It would demand a huge staff investment if we were to do that manually every time, so using AI allows us to move quickly and be highly efficient in building bespoke audiences for our partners.
Efficiency is a big factor—it enables us to do much more with the same staff we have today. But it’s also about performance. We can overlay our models to constantly iterate around an outcome, ensuring that we’re not just selecting inventory and audience segments but optimizing them against the goal and the goal rate. This lets us be really deliberate about refining and holding that audience.
That level of optimization is only possible with AI because it needs to process such an immense amount of data.
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