How Marriott rewrote
the rules of retargetingwith The Trade Desknearly

THE RESULTS

300%
uplift inbookings

55%

CASE STUDY
Advertiser
Marriott International, Digitas
Method
DCO, Dynamic Creative Rules

reduction incampaign cost

65%

increase in returnon ad spend

3-day

reduction inaverage booking lag

By now, every consumer has seen ads on the internet promoting items or experiences they have already purchased or are nolonger interested in. For brands trying to reach customers and prospects as many times as possible, this result is both inefficientand expensive. But it doesn’t have to be. With the help of The Trade Desk, Marriott International and its agency, Digitas, took
retargeting to a new level.
Using The Trade Desk’s suite of dynamic creative optimization (DCO) products, such as Dynamic Creative Rules, Marriott wasable to boost bookings attributed to the retargeting campaign by nearly three times, while increasing campaign efficiency andreducing cost per acquisition (CPA) performance by over 50 percent.
GETTING PERSONAL WITH CREATIVEIDENTIFYING THE AUDIENCEAs the world’s largest hospitality company, Marriott operates
30 brands in more than 130 countries. Accommodations
range from luxury resorts like the Ritz Carlton to upscale
hotels for busy executives (such as JW Marriott and Westin)and family-friendly chains like SpringHill Suites, with allstops in between.

The first step for Marriott was identifying who visitedtheir site with the intent to book a room. This is where
The Trade Desk’s universal pixel and tracking capabilities
helped Marriott better understand its visitors. By placing
The Trade Desk’s pixels on their web properties, Marriott cancapture data and insights across all its brand sites. Signals
such as desired destination and travel dates can be passed
within a single pixel fire. Digitas can then segment theaudience and retarget across all channels, including display,video, native, audio, and Connected TV.

In the past, a visitor to one of Marriott’s sites who didn’t end
up booking a room might later be shown a genericadvertisement for Marriott properties. But business travelers
looking to book a suite at the Ritz have very different needs,
expectations, and budgets than a busy parent looking forplaces to stay on a family road trip. So why should they beseeing the same ads?
From May to December 2021, Marriott’s U.K. division andDigitas began to experiment with DCO through rules-based
creative messaging built on attributes like a traveler’s current
location, first language, desired destination, dates of travel,
and hotel brand preferences. The theory: The more precisely
you can match the creative to a particular kind of traveler,
the more likely they are to return to a Marriott site tocomplete their booking.

thetradedesk.com | info@thetradedesk.com© 2022 The Trade Desk, Inc. Not meant for distribution
outside The Trade Desk, its partners, and clients.

With the audience established and advertising creative inplace, Digitas applied The Trade Desk’s Dynamic CreativeRules feature. This allows Marriott to easily pass relevant
first-party data to its ad server Jivox, which in turn assembles
personalized ads in real time based on several data sources,including Marriott’s reservation system for room availabilityand price) and first-party customer data (traveler’s location,language, etc.) via The Trade Desk’s platform.
To reach as many visitors as possible, Digitas layered on
The Trade Desk’s Identity Alliance, a solution that allows
Marriott to incorporate device data from all the major

Continued

How Marriott rewrote the rules of retargeting with The Trade Deskindustry players — Tapad, LiveRamp, Oracle Data Cloud,and Adbrain — to enable high-quality cross-device
targeting and measurement at the user level. This ensuresthat Marriott targets consumers across all device types,
not just the device that a visitor originally used to search
for a hotel. As a result of applying this advanced
capability, Marriott expanded its audience reach by over272 percent.
The impact: a 289 percent increase in bookings. Travelers
also booked faster — an average of five days after being
retargeted, instead of the usual eight — boosting returnon ad spend by 65 percent.

DRIVING PERFORMANCE
Of course, most people don’t necessarily visit a Marriott site to book their accommodations. Using second- and third-party data
(often not included in traditional DCO campaigns), the team applied the same personalization techniques to prospective
consumers shopping through online travel agencies like Kayak or Expedia. As a result, Marriott can look at airport codes, URLs,
and other third-party travel data to understand when a prospective traveler is shopping for a flight, then deliver relevant ads forhotels near their destination.
Marriott also leveraged Koa™, The Trade Desk’s artificial intelligence engine, to enable cost-efficient bidding based on theexpected rate to win each auction. By analyzing data from across the internet, Koa automatically optimizes performance andspend to ensure that brands reach the right audience, in the most efficient and effective way. This form of intelligent bidding,combined with Dynamic Creative Rules, helped Marriott realize a 55 percent reduction in the cost of its prospecting campaign.

Marriott was able to gain an advantage and drive incremental sales
through smarter use of first-party data and personalized creative.
PROSPECTS ARE LOOKING UP
As people emerged from their COVID bubbles last year, competition for their travel dollars was fiercer than ever. Marriott wasable to gain an advantage and drive incremental sales through smarter use of first-party data and personalized creative.
Ultimately, the aim of every digital marketer is to make the right offers to the right customers at the right time. With The Trade
Desk’s platform, Marriott is one step closer to that ideal.
• Nearly 300 percent uplift in bookings• 55 percent reduction in campaign cost
• 65 percent increase in ROAS
• Reduced average booking lag from 8 days to 5
• 272 percent increase in reach with cross-device targeting

thetradedesk.com | info@thetradedesk.com© 2022 The Trade Desk, Inc. Not meant for distribution
outside The Trade Desk, its partners, and clients.