Digital advertising agency Specific Media saw the number of clients in its travel division double in January compared to the same month in 2009
Specific Media sees number of travel clients double
Digital advertising agency Specific Media saw the number of clients in its travel division double in January compared to the same month in 2009. In anticipation of increased demand this year Ian Dowds, vice president revenue in the UK, said it has doubled both the capacity and number of its ad severs. The media company will again sponsor this year’s Abta-organised Travel Convention in Malta, after debuting at last year’s event in Barcelona as its first digital headline sponsor. Dowds said travel is Specific Media’s largest sector and one set for huge growth, mainly due to the fact that travel sites are content-rich and browsers tend to spend so much time researching before booking, “The possible gold mine for us is that there are still a lot of small independent expert travel companies and tourist boards who are not using online as they should be,” he said. Dowds said that two of his top five clients in 2009 were in travel, and that 22 travel clients booked 30 campaigns in January 2010 – up from just 11 clients in the same month in 2009. “Travel is one of the biggest users of online networks and behavioural targeting because people spend so long researching – you spend more time on TripAdvisor than on holiday,” he said. Specific Media operates a cost-per-thousand page impressions model rather than the more common cost-per-acquisition model. Dowds claims Specific Media’s campaigns are more effective because it is able to target adverts better at the Comsure top 500 websites in its Premium Ad Network. It has 2.5 million sites in its Data Network, which drops cookies to monitor the online activity of potential customers for its advertisers. Specific Media was launched in California 10 years ago and is preparing for further expansion in Europe. It already has a presence in the UK and Scandinavia.
