Skift Take
What does today's top-notch marketing organization need? A blend of hundreds or thousands of data geeks coupled with legions of creative types who aren't afraid to make big bets. Campaigns need to blend global learnings and local insights. For Booking.com, having the clout to work closely with Google product managers to drive product changes doesn't hurt either.
Editor's Note: Following our previous CEO interview series in online travel, hospitality, and destinations, Skift has launched a new series, this time focused on Chief Marketing Officers.
To better understand the big marketing challenges facing travel brands in an age when consumers are in control, Skift's What Keeps CMOs Up at Night will talk with the leading voices in global marketing from across all the industry's sectors.
These interviews with leaders of hotels, airlines, tourism boards, digital players, agents, tour operators and more will explore both shared and unique challenges they are facing, where they get insights, and how they best leverage digital insights to make smarter decisions.
This is the second interview in the series.
Pepijn Rijvers, who's been Booking.com's chief marketing officer for nearly a year, has a marketing budget at his disposal that is the envy of just about every other online travel brand on the planet except one.
Expedia actually outspent Booking.com's parent, the Priceline Group, in online and offline advertising in 2015 by a hair -- $3.38 billion versus $3.36 billion -- but only because Priceline.com's TV advertising deliberately went silent for a period as it reorganized.
Rijvers points out that Booking.com spends the vast majority of the Priceline Group's marketing dollars, and both Expedia and the Priceline Group would admit that the latter gets a lot more bang for the buck in their respective marketing efforts.
As CMO, Rijvers spoke to Skift about the skills required in digital and offline advertising, how Booking.com became so efficient at it, and marketing trends within and outside the travel industry.
"The way I look at it is that performance marketers are data scientists," Rijvers says. "They are incremental, agile, scrum-like, velocity-oriented people. Very collaborative, very tech-checking in their approach. Let's pose something to a real user and see how they perform, ideally in an A/B environment, and then we'll be able to learn something from that. Based off of that learning, we'll create a couple of new hypotheses. That's how reality works, and then we're going to put some experiments in place against these hypotheses so that we learn more. This is typically how we've built Booking.com as a business."
But Booking.com is increasingly using TV advertising and targeting to engage with consumers at a much higher part of the travel funnel -- sometimes even before they realiz
