Despite some reports, Travora Media, which rebranded from Travel Ad Network in 2011, continues to operate as an advertising sales and operations subsidiary focused on travel advertising through multiple touchpoints.
Travora is now operating as a subsidiary company, along with the technical expertise of AdVantage Media, under the MediaShift umbrella brand. The investment company JMG Exploration was behind the roll-up in February 2013.
The combined expertise of advertising sales and technical operations has created a company that now claims to be the "largest on-the-go community on the web, with over 30 million unique visitors."
By taking Travora's background in travel sales, and deals with travel planning sites like Gogobot, and placing it into AdVantage's existing relationships with hotels and airports, the company aims to build a much more robust and capable company that can target consumers across the travel lifecycle, from trip planning to airports to hotels.
As part of this integration and expansion, the company also announced today a 20-strong airport network, called the Premier Airport Network.
The network will deploy the company's patented technology - 2 patents retained, which 5 more pending - to fuel the technology that allows for monetization of public WiFi networks.
Airport travelers connecting to the free WiFi network will be greeted with display advertising at the start of their session, in addition to time-based video ad interstitials. Advertisers can then target travelers according to airport, in addition to in-airport location.
For travelers, free WiFi has become an expectation at airports - and ad-supported models are welcomed as a means to ensure affordable access for cash-strapped airports.
Following the airport browsing sessions, MediaShift can then follow travelers into the hotels, post-airport. This allows for some seriously granular tracking that provides great value to the advertisers.
MediaShift’s Airport Network launches with 20 major U.S. airports, including four of the 10 largest in the country. This initial footprint represents more than 200 million annual enplanements, providing advertisers access to more than 23 million unique users per month.
Tnooz spoke with Brendon Kensel, President of MediaShift:
This is the first time there is a digital playspace network in airports and hotels that provides scaled reach to travelers.
You have the opportunity to drive higher rates when you're able to deliver more clicks. Because of our dataset, we can reach them with the right message at the right time.
We generally know who the consumers are as far as broad demographics, ie. the type of hotel. From a behavioral standpoint, we can certainly understand behavior.
We also know definitely where a traveler is - so we can specifically target there. In an airport, we can not only target terminals, but in many cases we can get to the gate-level. We know the location, as we're the ones actually deploying via the WiFi network.
This is disruptive because we're stitching together the complete travel lifecycle - from booking to travel to the hotel - and then leveraging the dataset to better target.
Anytime you can layer in technology to drive efficiencies, that's enormous. Of course, layering in signifcant data and having the ability to filter and segment the data to sort and deliver consumers, gives you an advantage as a network. We're certainly bringing those to bear for our advertisers.
As far as usage, MediaShift is seeing some significant proof that tablets and smartphones continue to be devices-of-choice for travelers: during the Q1 2013 period, the company found that 53 percent of travelers use PCs and 47 percent use mobile devices to surf at airports.
For mobile devices, it was an even split between tablets and smartphones. MediaShift also found that the average traveler browsing session in airports is 57 minutes.
Armed with these statistics, in addition to the ability to serve advertising at different stages throughout a traveler's progress through a particular trip, MediaShift plans to aggressively expand the service.
The company has signed over 5,000 hotels to preliminary contracts, and is looking to further expand the Premier Airport Network.