San Francisco, Calif. April 26, 2012 – Sojern, the leading travel data and media company, today announced the appointment of Sylvia Weiler as general manager of the company’s tourism division. Weiler’s primary focus will be expanding Sojern’s tourism-specific product offering and advertiser sales efforts with destination marketers in the U.S. and abroad.

“Sylvia is a key addition to our tourism and destination advertising efforts and will be the driving force of our growth in this vertical,” said Mark Rabe, chief executive officer of Sojern. “Her expertise in product development and creating custom advertising solutions, both domestically and internationally, will be critical to Sojern as we expand our efforts in the tourism sector.”

Prior to joining Sojern, Weiler was with Travelocity for 12 years in various media sales and leadership positions. Most recently, she was director of online advertising sales where she played a key role in developing, launching and selling media products for Travelocity in new markets. Her latest efforts were focused on Latin America where she grew the company’s footprint and product offering.

“I am very excited to be joining Sojern at such a transformational time in their development. They’ve been growing rapidly and have really changed the way travel brands and destinations can reach existing and potential customers,” said Weiler. “The company has a powerful and unique vision and their products and data capabilities are perfectly suited for driving visitation and brand awareness for destinations.”

Weiler will make her Sojern debut at the Ataway Exchange travel conference that is being held in Orlando, Florida from May 7 – May 9, 2012.

http://www.tnooz.com/2012/03/29/how-to/why-tech-driven-last-minute-travelers-need-a-new-approach-to-marketing/

We live in a fast paced, minute-by-minute, “just-in-time” society. From Twitter to iTunes to HotelTonight, when people want something, they want it now. And for years, marketers have been trying to tap into this need for speed, and still offer a great product at a decent price. Now, with the ubiquity of mobile devices, wireless everywhere, unique payment methods and an app for just about everything, more and more people are “flying by the seat of their pants” when it comes to, well, flying and travel booking in general.

Recently there has been a huge jump in “just-in-time” travel – something I’d define as trips booked within three days of departure. According to Expedia*, 50 percent of all bookings through their Hotels app are for same day lodging and I am sure there is a similar stat for most of the last minute travel products out there. But while travelers may be jumping on the “just-in-time” behavior bandwagon, travel marketers, for the most part, have lagged and are thus missing an enormous opportunity.

Most attempts to capitalize on the last minute travel trend are based on offering discounts on unsold inventory – such as Priceline’s Tonight-Only Deals, Jetsetter’s packaged offers and the multitude of deal sites that have proliferated recently. Right now it’s all about pull marketing – using search, apps and discount offer sites to entice travelers to book on the spot. While nothing is wrong with this approach to capitalize on remnant inventory, in some cases, it can lead to unnecessary price dilution, restrain marketers through rate parity agreements and – most importantly – leave a lot money on the table.   Many of these last minute travelers need to book a hotel, car or other related activities and getting a discount on these products goes against the primary principles of yield management suppliers have used in the past.

It’s time for travel marketers to take a smarter and more proactive approach. Instead of relying on the pull from “last minute deals” marketed to people searching for discounts, marketers should “push” targeted offers specifically to travelers within the “just-in-time” window. Targeting these just in time audiences goes beyond price. It’s also about tapping into availability (is there a trip package or hotel availability that matches their schedule and circumstances?), opportunity (is there a special event taking place in the destination that people really want to/need to attend?) and convenience (can you make it easy for consumers to book a hotel room they have to book anyway?).

Targeted campaigns can also provide real value to travelers. For example, a traveler who books their flight within a few days of travel isn’t likely to have a hotel or a rental car lined up, and may also need information on airport parking, destination dining options, etc.  Designing campaigns with the last minute traveler in mind allows marketers to provide practical advice, relevant information and targeted offers. This can lead to a better experience for the traveler and better results for the marketer.  After all, most humans place a premium on convenience so if you can make life a bit easier for them, there is a good chance they will take you up on your offer.

From the marketer’s perspective, targeting “just-in-time” travelers allows campaigns to be about more than remnant inventory. Instead of pushing prices down, these campaigns can actually optimize revenue.  Offering the right deal to a traveler in the right mindset will be worth more than a generically discounted offer. The “just-in-time” approach – based on knowledge of travelers’ specific in-market intentions or actual upstream purchase behavior (i.e booking an airline ticket before a hotel room or rental car) – provides greater freedom in designing offers and greater pricing flexibility.

So what are the requirements to make “just-in-time” travel marketing work? It boils down to three things: targeting, insights and flexibility.

Targeting

Reaching “just-in-time” travelers specifically requires focused, demand-side data – such as flight search data, actual flight purchase data or flight check in data – that demonstrates clear intent to travel within a specific window. In addition to demand-side data, marketers also need channels to reach travelers in the time available – for example: precision display ad targeting, online itinerary messaging, boarding passes (printed and digital), travel apps, etc. All of these vehicles are available to travel marketers, but not all of them are used to their full potential.

Insights

To understand the travel behavior patterns of “just-in-time” travelers, marketers need closed loop campaigns – fed by focused data – to optimize campaigns over time and ultimately measure success.  Data, which gives insights into key traveler behavior, is paramount to matching that traveler with an offer that they will find relevant.   While “just-in-time” travelers share many attributes, their needs, desires and behaviors are unique and need to be addressed accordingly.

Flexibility

This may be the most important requirement of all. Travel marketers need to shift the way they conceive of and execute their campaigns. Within an organization – whether a hotel, airline or rental car company – marketing and revenue optimization rely on data. While each may be using data, they’re using it to their own ends and often independently of one another. Successfully reaching and meeting the needs of the “just-in-time” traveler will require aligning marketing efforts and yield management programs. This allows inventory and supply to be connected to demand generation in a meaningful and effective way.

In today’s last minute world, “just-in-time” travel will only continue to increase. The travel industry needs to move beyond their current pull-based efforts to take full advantage of this new world of consumer intent data and the “just-in-time” opportunity it presents. This move will require focused, demand-side data and analysis, technology for real-time push marketing campaign deployment and management, and a concerted effort to align management, marketing, and revenue optimization programs. The pieces are in place for marketers to make the shift – and it’s about time!

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/27/sojern-raises-7-5-million-for-its-push-into-travel-tech-and-targeted-travel-ads/

The travel industry is one vertical that seems to be seeing a lot of disruption at the moment — ranging from social media startups changing how we plan and book our journeys, to those who are re-examining how companies in the business are going to make money in the future. One of the startups working in the latter space, Sojern, today announced that it has raised a round of $7.5 million.

This round, Sojern’s third, was led by new investor Industry Ventures, with existing investors Focus Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Trident Capital all also participating.

Sojern started four years ago with a business focused around advertising on boarding cards. But it has more recently expanded to also offer a product it calls the Sojern Media Platform — essentially, an audience re-targeting service aimed specifically at the travel sector, relying on some 50 million pieces of anonymized travel data amassed by Sojern, as well as algorithms and other technology. The idea is to serve more targeted ads to travelers either as they are planning their trip, or while they are on it, with Sojern’s network touching “hundreds” of publishers, CEO Mark Rabe says.

(And, as a noteworthy side note, it’s telling that Sojern hired Rabe of all people, to lead the company last year: the guy has a lot of online advertising expertise. He is one of the (many) executives that have departed Yahoo in recent times; his most recent job at the Internet company was leading its business in the UK and Ireland.)

While Sojern does not break out revenues, Rabe notes that it is seeing the most growth from its newer line of business, the media platform was only introduced late last year.

Rabe says that the company has actually booked more revenue in the first three months of this year than it did for all of 2011. That points to the media platform potentially overtaking the boarding pass business in terms of importance for the company in the longer run.

Like many who work in the travel space, Rabe believes that the market is ripe for change. “Travel is really going through a revolution, one mostly focused on distribution,” he explains. “The focus is on marketing to people and taking advantage of the data available to them, and really changing how they go to market.”

One fact that spells opportunity for a startup like Sojern is that there are actually a lot of companies, such as airlines, that are not in the best state of financial health at the moment. That means they are on the lookout for new revenue opportunities, whether that is in the form of upselling their customers on their own services, or potentially linking up with others in co-marketing deals.

At the moment, there are several airlines and other companies that are strategic partners of Sojern’s with some holding equity stakes of undisclosed amounts. They include Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Carlson Wagonlit, Delta Air Lines, Hawaiian Airlines, Kayak, Travelport, United Airlines and US Airways. (Their relationship stems back to the founding of the company, and part of what airlines, for example, receive is a cut on the advertising revenues that appear on their boarding passes.)

Rabe says that the funding announced today is mainly being used to grow the company’s business in the U.S., which alone accounts for 50 percent of all air travel worldwide. Sojern, he says, has been mainly active “at the top of the purchase waterfall” — that is, around buying air travel — but in the data world, Sojern can potentially follow and monetize users as they continue along with the rest of their journey planning, whether it is to book hotels, rent cars or reserve seats in restaurants.

A further step down the line will be international expansion, although Rabe says that this could prove more challenging, given how fragmented the market is with smaller and more regional airlines almost more common than major global players.

http://www.eyefortravel.com/mobile-and-technology/sojern-confirms-75-million-funding

Mar 28, 2012

San Francisco [March 27, 2012] – Sojern, the travel data and media company, today announced $7.5 million in additional funding from its growing list of venture backers. Industry Ventures joins Sojern’s existing investors –Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital and Focus Ventures – to support the company’s continued growth and expansion.

“We’ve watched what Sojern has been doing to improve advertiser performance using its unique travel intent data,” said Hans Swildens, founder and managing partner at Industry Ventures, “and have been really impressed.  Their technology and overall approach – to provide very focused consumer advertising based on unique travel intent data and advanced media buying practices – has proven extremely effective.  We are extremely confident in Sojern’s leadership team as they address this huge market opportunity.”

Sojern has two discreet product offerings: the Airline Boarding Pass and the Sojern Media Platform (SMP). The Boarding Pass application enhances the overall air travel experience by providing relevant, targeted offers and content through many of the leading air carriers including American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Delta Air Lines, US Airways and United Airlines. The SMP, Sojern’s newest offering, is an audience targeting product that combines Sojern’s proprietary data, targeting algorithms, advanced media buying and optimization technology for exceptional campaign performance. .”<!–more–>

“We’ve seen really compelling growth of late and that’s a direct result of our unique position in the marketplace,” said Mark Rabe, Sojern’s chief executive officer. “We’re fortunate to add Industry Ventures to our existing roster of investors and look forward to working together to accelerate the business.”

To support Sojern’s continued growth and expansion into audience targeting and data management, the company has embarked on a comprehensive rebranding campaign. This effort reinforces Sojern’s mission to “reach travelers” through data-driven audience targeting and premium placements and illustrates the company’s benefits to its advertising clients and travel partners alike.

About Sojern

Sojern, Inc. is the premier travel data and media company. It has strategic partnerships with the world’s leading airlines, hotels, car rental companies and other travel industry organizations including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Carlson Wagonlit, Delta Air Lines, Hawaiian Airlines, Kayak, Travelport, United Airlines and US Airways. Sojern combines the most advanced travel advertising platform with a proprietary data set from the company’s network of strategic partners to offer advertisers the ability to target high-value consumers. Sojern is a privately held company with offices throughout the US. For more information, please visit www.sojern.com.

About Industry Ventures LLC

Industry Ventures is a leading investment firm that focuses on venture capital and technology growth equity.  The firm invests in secondary and primary opportunities, including purchasing direct portfolios, founders’ interests, tail-end funds, limited partnership interests and other special situations. Founded in 2000, the firm manages over $1 billion of institutional capital and is headquartered in San Francisco with an office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.industryventures.com.

The patent application was filed by Sojern’s founder, Gordon Whitten, prior to the launch of Sojern’s boarding pass technology that powers the online check-in process for American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Delta Air Lines, US Airways and United Airlines.

“We are delighted to receive recognition from the US Patent Office for our unique process and technology” said Mark Rabe, Sojern president and chief executive officer. “Gordon’s vision to partner with the largest US airlines nearly five years ago has revolutionized travel advertising by allowing marketers to deliver the right message to the right traveler at the right time.”

To augment its boarding pass business, the company recently launched the Sojern Media Platform (SMP), a marketing decision engine which combines Sojern’s proprietary data, advanced technology and targeting algorithms to maximize yield for its travel partners by reaching consumers at every point of the travel purchase funnel.

Posted by MediaPost.com

Data-driven marketing continues to grow by leaps and bounds. It’s on the minds of many marketers, and is in evidence as online advertisers amass search, demographic, behavioral and intent data to design their campaigns.

Each type of data has its place and value. As the volume of data skyrockets, it’s useful to step back and consider the different types of data, where they come from and how they can be used most effectively. Unique and highly focused data can be used as a signal booster for more effective intent-based targeting.

Marketers are becoming increasingly aware of the value of their own data — and of the value of third-party data available from a wide range of sources. Much of this is general behavioral data based on online activities. It can be layered on top of a marketer’s own information to help identify lookalike audiences or for granular audience targeting. Used appropriately, it can be very effective in reaching audiences with online campaigns.

In many industries there is an increasing trend toward a more focused approach to audience data. This is not based simply on a company’s own data, nor is it built on general third-party behavioral data. The most valuable data is unique, aggregated from multiple industry sources and highly relevant to the task at hand. It also has the critical ability to demonstrate consumer intent.

The travel industry provides an excellent example of how focused data can be used. Search and purchase data from multiple travel service providers can be combined to create a pool of clear intent. It can show who will be traveling, where they will be traveling, when they will be traveling, and even provide details such as many people are in a party.

Even aggregated and without any personally identifiable information, this is incredibly valuable information for a marketer looking to sell downstream travel services, such as hotel rooms or rental cars. Intent-based targeting and retargeting using focused data improves the value of impressions by limiting them only to people who need a service at the very time they are most likely to be seeking that service. It augments first-party data with highly relevant third-party data to create strong signals for reaching customers in a cluttered media environment.

Let’s look at how this approach might work in practice. It’s well understood that people typically book travel in a fairly set order: airline tickets first, then hotels, and finally rental cars and in-market activities. These steps occur as the travel date draws closer, with rental car bookings often happening only within 72 hours of a trip. Rental car companies are aware of this, but they’re not aware of who will be traveling during any specific time frame. This limits their options.

Rental car companies could simply use search data, targeting anyone who looks for destination information; but this is inefficient and would result in wasted impressions. They could use general behavioral targeting based on visits to various travel-related sites; that could reach people likely to travel, but it wouldn’t provide any insight into timing. The targeting might be improved but impressions would still be wasted.

A more successful approach is a focused data model that would include search and purchase data from multiple travel industry sources. This allows rental car marketers to deliver impressions only to people traveling within a specific time frame. Focused travel data provides actionable intent information that marketers can use as a signal strengthener to direct their efforts most effectively.

Data is everywhere, and new types of data become available every day –- along with new ways to put it to work. Marketers must recognize that all data is not equally suited to every purpose — and must consider the goals of a program, the audience they are trying to reach and the types of focused data most likely to provide actionable insights into that audience’s intentions. Once they do, they can begin exploring which sources provide the information that will be the most effective for them and their campaigns.

Adexchanger.com: So, in some ways, are you building an Orbitz competitor with Sojern?

MR: The answer is no. We are partnered with our airline partners – and it’s the majority of the large domestic airlines, who are also equity holders in Sojern.

We essentially render media and advertising to their travelers as they’re passing through the check-in process.

The company came into being when our founder, Gordon Whitton, who was based in Omaha, Nebraska, sold his last company to Intuit and was essentially doing the weekly commute from Omaha to San Diego. He was an organized guy and would wake up in the morning, print out his boarding pass, get to the Omaha airport and find himself staring at essentially a blank 8.5×11 sheet of paper.

He hit on the idea of, “I can program relevant content for travelers on that printed page as well as find advertisers that want to monetize it.” That was the germ of the idea. The printed boarding pass still represents a sizable chunk of our total annual revenue, and phase one of “the business.” Phase two was in the works when I arrived six months ago, and we launched it about three months ago – it was about taking a step back in the check‑in process and creating a rich, personalized experience for travelers as they navigate the check‑in experience. Imagine weather in the destination city, the top five restaurants as provided by one of our content providers, events that are happening in the city, and increasingly make the experience more customized or personalized to a user.

Can you share a little bit about your background and how you became involved with Sojern?

I came out of business school in ’99 and went to work for About.com and was there through the sale to Primedia. My last role there was building a product called Sprinks, which was a competitor to a company called Go To, at the time.

After we sold the company to Primedia, I had this epiphany, “If you can’t beat them, join them” and went to work for Overture – which was eventually acquired by Yahoo! At that time, I became part of the Yahoo team and was there for the better part of seven years.

The thing that resonated with me when I was evaluating opportunities post‑Yahoo, and came across Sojern, were two things. One – the assets that we have here, while at a much smaller scale, is akin to the Yahoo portfolio. We have the equivalent of an “Owned & Operated” where we are essentially creating a travel portal for a large majority of people who check-in online for a flight. That’s a web asset. It’s also a print asset. At the end of that check‑in experience, you click a button that says print your boarding pass and we render the content and the advertising that goes into that printed asset, too.

How does the revenue model work with the airlines?

There is a rev share component to the partnership with the airlines.

And there are all sorts of interesting spurs off of the boarding pass and the check-in process. We launched a mobile product recently. We’re starting to mine the social graph of travelers so that as they click through Facebook or LinkedIn, they can have, for example, their friends’ ratings on restaurants as well as what we’re getting from our content providers. There are all sorts of interesting and evolutionary things around the core business of the boarding pass whether in print or online.

Phase three of the company, and where I’m spending a lot of my time, is leveraging the data asset that we have from those airline relationships to target advertisers and for the benefit of our brand partners. That’s a new business for us, something we’re calling SMP, the Sojern Media Platform – it’s the audience targeting side of our business which leverages the data asset and which nobody else has access to.

Drilling down on the platform. are you selling the access to the data alone, or are you selling the media as well? Also – going direct to advertisers or through the agencies?

We have direct, large partnerships with many clients. We also work in concert with the agency channel and have a sales team and airline partner managers scattered around the country.

In terms of the product that we’re offering up to those clients, it is the media. We use the data to provide greater performance. Principally, it’s a performance buy for a lot of those endemic advertisers and it’s based on the uniqueness of the data. If you think of it from a high level, we know where these people have been, we know where they are now, and we know where they’re going.

We’ve got a compelling story for both the brand and the DR marketers and for the hardcore direct response guys. As long as it’s germane to the dataset, we can hit the accelerator on performance.

I take it you’re protecting your partners’ valuable, first-party data asset by not selling those cookies on their own – since it might commoditize the value of that data. Any thoughts?

It’s not what we do today, but I won’t say that we’ve ruled it out. We’re moving slowly because of the relationship we have with our partners and the sensitivity around access to the data. We went through a very extensive build‑out process.

If you think about our initial product, the boarding pass product, we literally had to reach into these old mainframe systems from the airline as the ticket is being rendered. Then, we had to deliver our content and advertising. That took a couple years to get off the ground. We’ll see how the data strategy evolves, but as it stands today for our advertisers, they’re more than happy to come to us through the media buy in order to have access to the data.

It sounds like what’s unique about this dataset isn’t just about cookie‑ing users that are buying tickets, instead it’s the ability to leverage that customer record and information that the airlines provide. Do you guys agree with that?

Yes. Where it leads us is some interesting places in terms of the sales process. We have a big chunk of our revenue coming from “local advertisers,” who want to reach people they know are traveling to a specific destination. Think parking, limousine, etc. It also takes us into some of the biggest brand advertisers on the planet because they’re looking to target the high value customer – the traveler. They want to do that at scale.

Would you agree that airlines are taking back their data versus relationships they’ve had in the past with companies like Orbitz?

I don’t know that they’ve ever lost their data. It’s an interesting dynamic in the marketplace today – this idea of owning the customer. You can just do a keyword search on some of the litigation that is taking place between the airlines and the OTAs an dso on. The landscape is changing and largely being driven by the airlines saying, “We want to exert or have more influence over what the purchasing habits and the channels are by which people buy our tickets and our ancillary services.”

You practically own these exclusive data assets and relationships with airlines.. Who is your competitor? It doesn’t seem like you have one.

We were just having this debate, internally, a couple of days ago. In one way, we have a lot of competitors because we run a print asset. You can argue that the entire publishing industry is competitive. Since we have an online portal experience, you can argue that any one of the major portals is our competitor. Since we play in the travel space, you can argue that anyone who sells media in travel is a competitor.

With the launch of our SMP, I’m very aware of the fact that we’re competing with a lot of the large ad networks and DSPs that are out there.

Where will you be buying media for your clients? I would assume exchanges are a big part of this?

We have relationships with several DSPs along with ad networks. Those are the principal plumbing points for us to reach the inventory in a real-time environment. We also have direct, publisher relationships. Both of those allow us to try different pools of inventory, and to find those users that we house.

At a high level, we have 50 million traveler profiles and slice and dice that database to the benefit of the advertiser that we happen to be targeting.

What about milestones a year or two from? What would you like to accomplish?

I think about our success in basically three different paradigms. The first is the traveler. Secondly it is the airline partner, and thirdly, it is the marketer, or the advertiser.

On the traveler side, what we’re increasingly testing is user engagement. We do a net promoter score and check on that on a weekly basis in order to understand the value of the content and the services we’re providing through that check-in process.

For the airline, it’s a mix of making sure that the traveler is happy and making sure that we’re maximizing the revenue potential for those partnerships.

For the advertiser, it’s making sure that the advertising products that we roll out for them are impactful, be it a brand campaign or a more traditional, direct response campaign that drives the Sojern Media Platform.