This online travel giant uses the Internet to capture people who already are in a travel mindset.

Renee Cashion is Senior Marketing Manager for online travel site Travelocity. In this role, Cashion is responsible for creative production of Travelocity advertising. She works closely with a creative agency and internal resources to ensure that components are produced on strategy and within specifications, timelines and budget—and to identify opportunities and evaluate the performance of the campaign to achieve optimal results.

iMedia Connection: What are the most significant roles online plays in building and expanding your brand?

Cashion: We use it primarily for direct response, online transactions.

iMedia Connection: You are in a very competitive field. What have you found works most effectively for you in differentiating yourself and capturing the market?

Cashion: In our online efforts, we focus on making placements on travel-related sites, talking to consumers when they are in the travel mindset rather than trying to motivate them to travel. In fact, we place very little online advertising that isn’t on travel-related sites, or based on travel-related search terms.

iMedia Connection: One of your competitors uses a lot of pop advertising and claims to have a lot of success using these tactics. How do you compete against that?

Cashion: We started testing the use of pop-unders last year and we kept them in the plan for 2004 because we’ve found them to be successful. But we use them differently than Orbitz. They’re using them for branding, and take an in-your-face-all-over-the-place position. As with our other advertising, we buy targeted placements and utilize the same direct response metrics as our other online advertising.

iMedia Connection: What can’t online do, despite what everyone would like to believe?

Cashion: I personally believe there’s nothing you can’t do online, but we are in the process of identifying the most efficient media for a variety of objectives. Because we’re an online company, we have a unique ability to track online advertising directly to bookings. So when you have initiatives that have softer measures, like for branding, it’s harder to get buy-in for online as the channel to accomplish the objective.

iMedia Connection: What are you doing to try to change that mindset?

Cashion: I’m working with agencies to identify and propose online branding initiatives. Some companies are willing to create package deals as part of the direct response buy that include value-added branding effectiveness metrics.

iMedia Connection: How does online fit in with the rest of your marketing efforts? Does it stand-alone or do you take an integrated approach? 

Cashion: Moving forward, we’re taking a more integrated approach then in the past. In the past, we were handling online separately—they way it was bought, created, etc. But moving forward, we’re trying to carry the same look and feel, use the same messaging across the board, and so on. As I mentioned earlier, we are trying to understand how all of the media works together to accomplish the objectives instead of assuming that each placement or medium can only achieve one type of result.

iMedia Connection: Will the size of online within your mix change this year?

Cashion: Last year everything we did was direct-response oriented, and online was a key part of that. We will continue to maintain a strong online presence, but this year we launched a new branding campaign in January, which inherently requires increased presence within the more traditional mediums. 

iMedia Connection: What has been your biggest online success, either alone or as part of a larger campaign or promotion?

Cashion: What we consider our online success last year is the optimization techniques we employed. We’ve learned a lot about working with our placements to get them optimized, which has allowed us to build an even stronger online program for 2004.

iMedia Connection: What one thing would you like agencies to “get” about your needs and your business? Or, what one thing would make the client/agency relationship better?

Cashion: The understanding of how online fits into the mix. Online is still separated out in mindset, with budgets, etc. We all need a better understanding of how the media play together to meet the objectives.