News that Ryanair has signed a deal with data marketing specialist Adara is interesting in that it gives the airline access to additional revenue from targeted advertising, as well as hopefully the sale of ancillaries.
But, it also opens up a debate around consumer data and how and when they are targeted with relevant advertising.
First, a few details of the partnership, which enables advertisers to target the airline's customers via targeted and retargeted ads on and once they leave the carrier's website.
Ryanair could also make use of the platform, which gathers information (nothing to identify you, says Adara) on what you have looked at, to retarget potential customers, who have looked but not booked.
The exclusive partnership kicks off next month and will last for three years.
It all seems pretty clever - you book a flight to Seville in Spain and a cookie is planted on the server which then tracks your web activity and presents you with relevant hotel options for that stay in Seville.
To ensure advertisers are not wasting their money a frequency cap is put on how many times an ad will be shown and if a hotel is booked, in many but not all cases, Adara receives a message so the hotel can divert spend to other promotions.
Relevancy is important and, says Adara's commercial boss Scott Garner, there are ways via an algorithm to present the right offer by making assumptions based on online behaviour.
If the system has you down as a budget/backpacker type then the idea is you'll be offered lower end properties than five-star frequenters.
Making assumptions is interesting too as this infographic shows how Facebook "Likes" can reveal ethnicity, political and religious views and much more.
A couple of weeks ago Tnooz ran an article on how retail principles from other sectors being applied to travel, which caused a bit of a storm in the comments section (worth reading), based on the fact that maybe consumers don't want to be tracked (even if anonymously) and then "bombarded" with offers.
Some even suggest that going forward the customer will own their own data and that:
"...the era of big data will go as fast as it came, and die a rapid, horrible and painful death."
This does not hold Adara up as doing anything wrong, its model is to help advertisers and travel distributors earn more revenue via a more targeted approach. Garner reiterates that the company doesn't collect personal information and monitors privacy regulation.
"Users can always control what information is showed and can opt out of everything."
That's if they're aware of it and there's a growing belief that consumers will, wake up to and be increasingly sceptical of, all of this online tracking.
There is another point of view which says that, like it or hate it, social media has made privacy a non-issue and if we can harness data to help consumers make a more informed decision then it's a good thing.
So, come full circle and answer the question of whether 'online marketing is getting more sophisticated or just more annoying?'
It's probably both - for travel companies the increasing levels of sophistication should be a good thing as conversion rates increase.
Certainly Adara says one hotel recently saw a 20:1 return on a campaign. But for many consumers the converse creep factor is also, inevitably, increasing.
NB: CCTV image via Shutterstock