Big Interview: Lastminute’s new media arm Forward to tap into in-housing trend

Big Interview: Lastminute’s new media arm Forward to tap into in-housing trend

Alessandra Di Lorenzo tells Lee Hayhurst why she decided to convince the OTA to create the new division to help travel and non-travel brands with their digital marketing expertise

Alessandra Di Lorenzo tells Lee Hayhurst why she decided to convince the OTA to create the new division to help travel and non-travel brands with their digital marketing expertise

“If something is core to the business, it should be inside the business.”

That unequivocal statement explains why Lastminute.com last month announced the creation of its own independent media company Forward.

It comes from Alessandra Di Lorenzo, the chief executive of Forward, who established The Travel People at Lastminute.com after joining from eBay in 2016.

It was the success of this media arm of the OTA, which had worked with over 500 clients on campaigns targeting Lastminute’s audience, that helped spawn Forward.

Di Lorenzo said: “We began by working with brands in the travel space, but we started to pick up a lot of brands outside of the travel sector that wanted to work with us.

“We essentially in-housed the entire media operation – monetisation and marketing technology on the publishing side, and also a lot of marketing buying capabilities to expand campaigns.

“We were doing so many things we decided to spin out of the mother to create our own media company Forward. We were very confident we could help other brands to do what we have done with Lastminute.com.”

Forward’s stated mission is to “help businesses move forward by unlocking new opportunities to make their marketing activity more efficient, intelligent and relevant”.

It combined the Travel People, which is travel focussed, and Playbook a consultancy that promises to help businesses become more competitive by “in-housing” their marketing.

Forward has ambitious growth plans and employs 60 people in two hubs in London and Milan and it has activation teams and marketing expertise in Germany, Spain and France and a team in South Africa.

“Our ambition is to expand further what we have done with Lastminute and work with more brands because our data is valuable even outside of the travel sector,” said Di Lorenzo.

“We want to help businesses move forward thanks to our data and our marketing knowhow and our technology, and I think we can do that both inside and outside of travel.

“Travel is such a difficult industry in which to grab customer attention we thought how can that be applied to equally competitive sectors.”

Although the Travel People was achieving considerable year-on-year top line growth of 40% in three years, Di Lorenzo said she knew it could not stand still.

“We had a very healthy business on our hands, but we had a need to continue evolving. We needed to continue moving and in-housing is a very big trend in travel.

“In general brands want to take more control and with our data insights we are there to help.

“The model is to superpower brands. We want to go in and help brands create an asset that’s sustainable for them.

“Parts of travel are still very traditional and dominated by offline in many markets still. Digital is perhaps not as mainstream as in other sectors.

“Tourism board are an example of very traditional operations. It’s sometime hard to really grasp what is going on with all the different vendors in the marketing space.

“Today it’s content marketing, tomorrow it’s influencers. How do you pick the right one?

“There is a missed opportunity for us and partners to help brands in the travel sector overcome challenges and make decisions faster and with more confidence.

“We can help speed up marketing transformation to help navigate the very confusing digital landscape.

“Then, of course, we are a very audience performance led organisation. We will help anyone looking to improve their data-driven performance marketing.

“We are here to support brands with all of the things that should be inside the brand, stuff that’s core to the business should be inside the business.

“If you are running data driven programmatic buying ads off site using your own data that should be managed by you. We want to build a sustainable advantage when it comes to innovation.”

Playbook will kick off activities in the UK before branching out into Europe. Di Lorenzo said although it is a consultancy, it is one where its people will be “getting their hands dirty” working closely with its clients.

The confidence to pitch the idea to the Lastminute board was backed up by an Adobe survey that claimed 62% of brands will be taking their programmatic media buying in-house by 2022.

“I think we are sitting on an amazing opportunity,” said Di Lorenzo. “I was sitting on a place and I started thinking. When I got off the place I emailed Steve [Wakeling] who was running Playbook.

“I said I have a business plan. So we started scoping this out and the more we scoped it out the more we believed it.”

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