Sounding Off: Being able to shift ad budgets will please all in travel (except Google)

Jackie Lamping, vice president of marketing, Sojern

"A big chunk of budget is already going toward social media, which means people are seeing results and wanting to move more budget there."

Quote from Jackie Lamping, vice president of marketing at Sojern, in an article on PhocusWire this week on where travel marketers are placing their ad dollars.

Each Friday, PhocusWire dissects and debates an industry trend or new development covered on our site that week.

Social media advertising has taken some time to become a viable option for travel marketers - but perhaps the sector is starting to sense a genuine shift.

It's not that long ago that commentators wondered how the likes of Facebook (and later, Instagram) would actually make serious money.

Facebook figured it out and has not looked back, despite the emergence of other platforms ("oh well, let's just buy it," is presumably how it felt when Instagram came along) and concerns over privacy, etc.

It's sheer size, the depth of data that it collects about members and the opportunity for targeting those interests is an opportunity for travel brands that they've never really had before.

The ad market has taken a while to warm up but Facebook and Instagram are accepted players, especially in the minds of advertisers that do not have the eye-watering budgets that some of the giants of online travel can throw about.

And it appears that marketers, according to Sojern, are going further and want to spend more.

This is likely to happen for the aforementioned lower budget holders first, yet it is not inconceivable that the free-spenders at the top range will shift, too.

For example, Glenn Fogel of Booking Holdings has made his opinions very clear, albeit diplomatically - when an alternative comes along that works, then brands may have the chance to scale back some of their spend with Google.

This becomes - as has been noted many times before - more important to any travel brand as Google builds out more travel services with one hand, whilst as many argue taking money from companies via their adspend with the other hand.

Google will not be hitting the panic button just yet - let's be realistic - but percentage points lost here and there from various pockets of the sector do have an impact over time.

And all the time Facebook and its kin stick to the formula they have (heavily filtered pictures, cat and beach videos, networks, fan pages, etc) and do not build travel services, then change is likely to come... And then Google will have to react.