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Marriott International ́s financial results for the third quarter of 2020 showed that the business was dramatically impacted by the COVID-19 global pandemic*. How was Marriott’s strategy adjusted in an effort to contain the impact of the pandemic on their hospitality business?
In 2020 the hotel industry has suffered through its worst period in modern times, as the pandemic has led to world-wide cutbacks in leisure travel, business travel and cancellations of conference events. As a response to decreasing hotel bookings, Marriott and their agency Publicis Media shifted their strategy to increase awareness, understand consumer behaviour and drive consumers towards their Food and Beverage establishments.
Publicis Media engaged Adsquare as a neutral, independent and omnichannel footfall measurer to quantify actual store visits to Marriott’s F&B POIs after users had been exposed to their ad campaigns. The campaigns ran in 7 different countries in APAC (Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, South Korea and Australia). Thanks to Adsquare, Publicis Media was able to measure offline visits attributed to media activations on Programmatic Display and Social Media. Creatives were strategically split into different pillars to test what type of content resonated the most within each target audience. When users were exposed to a Marriott ́s ad on their personal devices and walked into a Marriott ́s store, Adsquare was collecting granular location signals of each user with user ́s consent and it was attributing these visits back to the campaign within a 7-day lookback period to realize the true impact of the ads.
Adsquare Footfall Measurement solution activated on Social Media and Programmatic Display allowed Publicis Media to optimize their media spend in real-time during the campaign based on best performing creatives, ad formats, inventory and audience strategies. Thanks to these optimizations, Marriott gained 63% savings in Cost per Visit in only 1 month.
What sets Adsquare apart is the ability to measure our digital campaigns across multiple markets and independently of each channel. It is a particularly important feature to us when measuring the impact of our always-on multi-market campaigns.
Austin Tenny, F&B Digital Marketing at Marriott International