Lack of attribution is the key reason Brands hold back on creator marketing

CreatorIQ recently brought out their annual report on the state of creator marketing in 2024. The highlights are:

• 98% of industry leaders believe the creator content drives more ROI than traditional marketing

• investment in creator content has already increased 143% over the past 4 years; BUT

• that would be WAAAAAAAY bigger except for the inability to measure creator content performance is holding back more performance marketing budget being moved to the creator side

“For the first time in our five years of conducting this survey, neither inadequate budget nor creator marketing staff surfaced among brands’ top three roadblocks. In fact, inadequate staff was the least significant roadblock to executing creator marketing programs in 2024, chosen by only 16% of brands.

The No. 1 roadblock for brands in 2024? Difficulty measuring creator performance.”

For travel at least, enter Videreo where our offer to brands is direct measurement of creator performance that you can see BEFORE you choose which creators you might choose to engage in a content creation campaign.

Videreo are building an ecosystem where creators can earn from actually selling the brands they and their followers love and then brands can reward the best of those further with paid and sponsored campaigns to fuel more content, and more attributable sales.

Problem solved. Check out more here if this is of interest to your brand.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

AI-generated review summaries start driving SEO impact

A fantastic report this week from Kevin Indig in his Growth Memo newsletter, blended the worlds of SEO and AI to find out what impact AI was already having on SEO results. This isn’t some future, maybe state - this is now and the results were worth taking note of.

“Tripadvisor’s AI Review Summaries grew organic traffic to review pages by 2x. The number of indexed review pages has not increased, which is a strong indicator that AI reviews were the driver.”

Indig compared this to how Expedia was treating its AI generated reviews in a different way (away from the view of the Googlebot), to their detriment.

And if you’re not sure how to exactly go about it, Indig spilled the beans on that also. “The Tripadvisor team used RAG to ground a Chat GPT 4 model in user reviews and BERT to extract key quotes.”

Indig also dug into how some of the newer entrants to the market were doing and how they might be able to get an edge, including this hot tip: “Superior AI experiences. Agile startups could build in weeks what might take a giant like Expedia months.”

I’m looking to get Kevin on the podcast (now available on both Spotify & Apple podcast for the first time!) in the near future to go through the research in greater detail.

I also want to give a shout out to Brennan Bliss and Propellic who sponsored the research so everyone can have these learnings available to them. Propellic are the absolute best I know in travel in supporting efforts to help get the wider industry educated - including being initial and long-term sponsors of this fledgling media and if I’m not mistaken, also support Dan Christian’s Travel Trends & Mauricio Prieto’s Travel Tech Essentialist.

At worst, everyone owes Brennan an Old Fashioned at the next conference they see him at and at best, it would be great to see some others likewise stepping up to the plate. Brennan’s back must be getting sore carrying the rest of the industry.

Of course, he also knows a little secret most others haven’t worked out and that is, it’s also really great value (cheap I’d actually say) marketing to be a giver and keeps you in the spotlight. This is not a sponsored post.

Agentic AI is a MAJOR threat to marketplace businesses, especially in travel

Max Niederhofer, a partner at Heartcore Capital, this week set off a few alarm bells I’m sure with his predictions around marketplace businesses and their place in an agentic world.

“Agentic AI fundamentally changes (these) dynamics. It will make accommodation much easier to book, circumventing the OTAs, and open up more of the market to travel advisors, AI itself, and direct digital.” said Niederhofer in his post on LinkedIn.

The dynamics he is speaking about is the leveraging of “their supply (selection, convenience, and price) to maintain incumbency.”

“The OTAs are 25 year old companies and many folks in the travel industry seem to assume they'll be around forever. I think we're about to see some interesting developments.”

You can get the full scoop by reading Niederhofer’s blog post or listening to him explain the agentic AI process here where he says “when I talk to corporate at Expedia or Booking, they kind of get it, but not really!”

Shots fired!

AI agents explained as if to a 5-year-old

If you’re still not sure after viewing Max’s explanation above about AI agents then try this explanation to a 5-year old on for size.

It does a reasonable job up until the bit where it says: “you can also add crypto and onchain integrate to the agents through different tools and sdks like coinbase agent kit”

At that point the 5-year-old in me went back to putting crayons up my nose.

AI influencers now have agencies (if not agency)

Hot on the heels of the recent news about Emma, the AI influencer who is selling Germany to world, we’ve quickly moved straight into entire agencies of AI influencers from which you can take your pick.

These influencers don’t have any followers.

Or friends.

But they look the part and don’t fluff their lines when spruiking your shizzle in IG ads.

In great news for real human creators - I tried to make a video that I could put here, but the software didn’t really work……..

Marketplace Spotlight: Watermelon

If you haven’t checked out the Everything AI in Travel marketplace as yet - you should! It’s full of the best AI powered B2B tools around, including chatbot maker: Watermelon

This week Watermelon dropped a travel specific example of how they are helping the largest camper association in the Netherlands, NKC with their customer service. “'We aim to be the digital travel companion for our members, ready to answer questions anytime', says Erik Hilhorst, data analyst at NKC."

As for implementation, Hilhorst reported “We were live in minutes, and those basic questions worked perfectly from the start!“

It wasn’t the first attempt at automating parts of the service NKC offers to their clients but “our old tool was clunky and rigid, while Watermelon offers the flexibility and simplicity we needed.' 'One of the best things about Watermelon’s software is that we can make changes ourselves without technical knowledge and see immediate results.”

You don’t need to spend a lot of time or spend a lot of money to see how tools like these can be effective in your business. I generally recommend that teams first use them internally alongside whatever it is they are doing now. When you get a question, answer it how you do now (generally manually) but also copy it into the bot and see what response you get. If happy - give it a tick. When you are almost always more happy than not - deploy it to a sub segment of your audience, like maybe your Instagram responses or business WhatsApp. monitor it for a bit and keep rolling it out.

You’ll find Watermelon and lots of other great tools in the marketplace!

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Where AI images just might work in Travel

I’m generally pretty down on AI image generation for consumer marketing in travel. It just doesn’t feel like the right thing to be doing.

Except if you come up with a concept where its application doesn’t deceive the user (a point robustly made by Tahnee Perry in our recent discussion on the podcast) but rather enhances their overall knowledge & experience, potentially giving them more reason to book.

I like this example offered by Muhammad Ayan on LinkedIn where the subject is history - something every place has - where the storytelling is made more vivid and real by turning old photographs into moving videos.

There is still a note I’d add around cultural appropriation and imagining up characters in certain scenarios and cultures where I’d check myself and do a robust round of question asking before pushing publish (or likely not).

AI goes to pot

Finally this week, this announcement of a new partnership grabbed my attention.

Minut, a property insights platform that helps property managers and rental owners maintain safe, sustainable, and well-managed properties without sacrificing guest or tenant privacy this week announced a partnership with HostBuddy AI, an AI-powered guest messaging platform designed to streamline communications for short-term rental hosts.

The partnership is enabling fully automated and tailored communication with guests in real-time for property managers.

“After Minut sensors detect issues like excessive noise or cigarette and marijuana smoke, HostBuddy AI automatically drafts and delivers sensitive, tailored messages to guests, notifying the property manager or owner.

This integration allows property managers to address issues swiftly without manual intervention — even in the middle of the night when most noise incidents take place. This minimizes disturbances for neighbors, enhances the guest experience, and ensures smooth, respectful stays in short-term rental properties.”

“Busted!”

Slack Group!

Podcast is now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

The Everything AI in Travel podcast is now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Whatever is your favorite way to consume intelligent audio (or video), we’ve now got you covered. Just hit follow in your fav and you’ll never miss an episode again.

To celebrate - we are dropping all the previous 25 episodes, 1 a day between now and XMAS so if you missed one or a few or have never heard any of them - then you can get yourself totally up to speed over the upcoming holiday period!

The Everything AI in Travel marketplace is now launched - please just jump on the site to grab your listing if you have an AI tool or service that you want the industry to know about.

Most clicked last week was the link to how Videreo is creating new business models for content creators! Great to see the interest!

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think