In the Big Chair - Cree Lawson of Arrivalist

Cree Lawson, CEO

Arrivalist measures the movement of network-enabled mobile devices to determine what digital content influences consumers to visit a physical location. More than 130 location marketers around the world use its products.

Before launching Arrivalist, Cree Lawson founded Travel Ad Network, a leading vertical ad network, and prior to that he worked in a variety of management, sales and marketing roles for publishing companies. 

How did your work with Travel Ad Network, which you founded in 2003, help you develop the idea for Arrivalist?

I love marketing travel online on both an intellectual and emotional level. Who wouldn’t be excited to spend their working days sorting out how media inspires people to plan the best two weeks of their year. It’s exhilarating every day.

My investment strategy in online media has always been to find and illustrate the value above, beyond and outside of the online booking/transaction funnel.

The prevailing notion is that online media is only there for booking travel or purchasing lift tickets, amusement and show tickets, etc., as opposed to planning, sharing, researching and getting inspired. So for much of my career I’ve been challenging travel marketers to see the forest of travel planning – not the trees of booking engines.

Arrivalist is a similarly disruptive premise.

Success in travel has one common denominator: a person visits a place. It may be a large geographic destination or the specific area of an amusement park. Regardless, if you truly want to measure the impact of marketing holistically, everything else is a proxy for this one action. The arriving visitor may have made an advanced booking, or they may not have. Similarly they may spend money when they arrive, or they may not. They may take a survey when they get there or after they arrive (or return), but they probably won’t. 

The only true way to measure media impact is to look from at arrival backward to the ad exposure. That way you can see ALL responses (whether they booked in advance or not). You can also see arrivals from users who saw ads on one device and then arrived with another. Now that location data is here, it’s never been easier to illustrate – holistically and accurately – the way that your media visitation from ALL channels, not just one or two that happen to be trackable. And thankfully the tourism world has caught on.

It’s been about five years since you launched Arrivalist – what do you know now that you didn’t know then?

Every report we deliver contains surprises. I know that people from Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin are more likely to go to Gulf Shores in the winter than people from neighboring Mississippi. I know that visitors of New Orleans Jazzfest were more likely to go to the local retail outlet than those who came for a different festival the week before. I know the competitive visitation patterns between two competing amusement attractions in Florida are different depending what states the visitors come from. And I know that people who visit NOLA show up 14 days after visiting the website, not 90 days after visiting the website. And that’s just this week. Kidding, sort of.

Every day we learn a new lesson about just how slippery, strange and convoluted customer behavior patterns can be. And just how easy it is to change campaigns around to influence those visitors.

The most interesting lessons are the counterintuitive ones. For example, when we started out five years ago, we were showing customers how their media influenced visitation. About a year later we realized that we needed to illustrate the fact that their media was influencing visitation first. Then they could measure the "how" aspect. 

I’ve learned that by leaning on one ad creative, not seven other ones, Galveston can increase mid-week visits by 16.1%.

Recently we realized that we “over-solved” the questions that were being asked of our A3 product. Originally we’d been showing our clients where media-exposed visitors were coming from. We found, oddly enough, that many of our clients had no idea where their “walk-up” visitors came from in the first place.  So we developed two quite different reports - visitation by origin market and arrivals (media-exposed users) by origin market.

What types of information are you able to gather, and what is the range of accuracy?

We basically look at ad exposures on a series of devices, which may or may not be owned by the same owner and location data points. The accuracy of our location data has increased dramatically since we started the company.

When we launched Atlantic City and Kansas programs in 2012, we could say each location data point was accurate to within 30 miles. Today it’s accurate to within 30 feet. How do I know it’s 30 feet? It’s a long story that involves a truck stop in Oklahoma that we started measuring due to a human error. But the punchline is this - we can measure down to 30 feet.

The data you gather is anonymized – do you see that changing in the future?

We have invested many resources making sure our data cannot be tied to an individual. For clients who have advanced, express “opt-in” to collect location from their customers (like a traveler filling in Visitor Card data for instance), they can connect our data with those users personal information if they so choose. But that’s our clients connecting data to consent they’ve collected. I don’t see us collecting or storing what we call Personally Identifiable Information in the near future. 

What’s commonly misunderstood is that consumers think we would want information about one person as a distinct user. Even if we had it, that kind of information is valueless to us. We need 1,000, 10,000 or better yet 1,000,000 visitors. There’s no market or business model for information on just one individual or device.

Why is it important for DMOs and other travel marketing organizations to understand where their customers are coming from?

If there’s one time-tested truism in marketing, it’s that whoever knows their customer best wins. If you know where your customer is likely to come from then you can target media and deliver content that will appeal to them. If you know that “Best Slots” ads attract users from 50 miles away and “Family Entertainment” content drives visitors from 500 miles away then you can target the right message to the right audience at the right time. Even in cities like Nashville and New York that have more visitation than their hotels can handle, these places can measure duration of stay by origin market and created targeted ads to places where people stay longer when they visit. The same dataset can be used to attract the “right customer” as opposed to the “most customers.”

Looking back to your Travel Ad Network career, what's your general view on the travel marketing landscape in 2018 and the challenges that brands face now?

I’m really excited to see most advertisers embracing incremental measure of marketing response. For too long we assumed that if a conversion follows a click or an impression then that click or impression directly caused the transaction. That’s like saying that a rooster’s crowing makes the sun rise. It’s a crazy practice that has no foundation in statistics or mathematics. The sharp, driven and adventurous marketers we talk to continue to challenge the status quo of conversion tracking and we enjoy being a part of helping solve that challenge.

What are some of the most effective media strategies to drive consumer behavior?

We’ve seen many clients take action on media exposure sequences. For example, a lot of cities have excess hotel inventory during the mid-week period, and for one client we found that retargeting out-of-state visitors who had searched for the city or visited its website with pre-roll video increased mid-week stays by 16%. That had a meaningful impact for them.

What trends are you seeing with destination organizations and how they collaborate (or not) with suppliers and intermediaries?

We’ve noticed the strongest partners we work with establish transparency, measurability and communications with their suppliers and intermediaries. When the measurement objectives are identified upfront, communication lines are open and all parties are transparent with each other, great things can happen within an organization. VisitNC is a DMO group that comes to mind as doing this very well. Their vendors know the goals, receive regular updates on how they’re progressing and receive regular communications about their progress. 

This is especially true when a client has to balance various research partners, and different agencies within its own internal management. We’ve been amazed by how easy it’s been to work with survey research groups in the tourism space. They don’t see what we do as competitive; instead they have all worked with us to help achieve the greater organizational goals. Tourism is a great industry for collaboration.

What developments are on the horizon for marketing technology?

Three things: Privacy Rules of Play need to be established with consumers, and GDPR is forcing this issue. Consumers need to know that all the free content they ingest is an information exchange with the advertiser, and advertisers need to respect the requests of the consumer. (Even if that means blocking access to ad-supported content for people who don’t wish to exchange information with the advertiser.)

The second is the advent of blockchain in media. Will we be able to replace impression histories with blockchain? And can we use it to keep track of who has consented to sharing information and who hasn’t?

And finally Over the Top (OTT) video: These services and platforms are gaining market share at an increasing rate. Our TV advertising – driven by the set top box - will soon start taking an appreciable share of market, and will soon be traded programmatically. The question is whether ad buying transparency and measurability will follow.

What are some of the hurdles you face when talking to prospective clients?

Two things: Changing in-grained measurement practices like click-based metrics and price point can be challenging. However, Destination Marketers have really made huge strides in embracing new measurement tools. 

If there’s one time-tested truism in marketing, it’s that whoever knows their customer best wins.

Cree Lawson - Arrivalist

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For marketers who are embracing omni-channel measurement and incremental response, the challenge can sometimes be price point. For years we’ve had to balance the drive to give marketers the best while still fitting into existing budgets. We’re always trying keep costs under control to give our clients the best tech available to validate what they do has an impact each and every day.

What’s next for Arrivalist?

We’re bringing insights that destination marketers have embraced to the rest of the marketing world. Marketing actual places – as opposed to products – is really difficult. The product isn’t in your control and the consumer can take forever to decide, and they visit 30+ websites before they choose you.

We’ve begun to see great signups for our services to other destination marketers, but in the non-government sector, like museums, amusement parks, casinos, destination-retail and hotels. We’re really taking the insights that destination marketers forged and sharing them with these marketers. Our approach has been to solve the most difficult problem first. If you can measure the way media inspires someone to go to the other side of the world, you have a serious headstart o

n telling a client which media makes a person walk in to a store.

We also have a lot of product extensions in the development pipeline that we can’t wait to reveal.

What do you personally want to learn more about in the next year?

What on earth is going on in my children’s heads. They amaze me every day. I wish I could see the world through their eyes.

Having founded two successful companies, what is your advice to entrepreneurs trying to break through in travel today?

Thanks for asking as I’m passionate on this issue. My advice to founders is to demystify the creation of a company. Starting a company is a pretty simple series of questions: Can you provide what you say you can? Will your customers pay for it?  And can you provide it for less than you’re paid for it?

If you can honestly prove that equation works, you’re on your way. From there it’s just drive, grit and humility. A little luck helps as well. And a good logo.