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Ad Age Marketer's Brief
Evolving a media network to meet growing advertiser demands with Marriott's Chris Norton
00:23:28
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- [00:00]
A
This episode is sponsored by Kantar. Too often creative effectiveness is treated as a final check, not as a decision intelligence that helps shape campaigns while they're being built. Kantar's link changes. That link is an end to end creative effectiveness system built for modern, fast moving campaigns. It brings together deep human and cultural understanding. AI powered optimization and decision intelligence embedded directly into creative workflows drives stronger campaign performance and brand growth. With link by Cantalk, visit try.kantar.com AdAge.
- [00:38]
B
Hi, I'm Adrienne Pascarelli, Senior Editor of CMO Strategy and Commerce at Ad Age, and welcome to another edition of the Marketer's Brief Podcast, our weekly discussion about marketing news and trends that have the industry buzzing. Retail media has seen a meteoric rise in recent years as marketers recognize the value to advertisers of their first party data. But there are still a host of challenges as everyone fights for a piece of the pie. Today we'll be talking with Chris Norton, Senior Vice President of Marketing Capabilities and General Manager at Marriott Media Network. Norton has worked at Marriott for the past five years. Prior to that, he was at Epsilon, where he worked with travel and media brands on their data strategies. He'll discuss how Marriott is differentiating itself in the crowded landscape of media networks, including through a partnership with United Airlines, own media network and new in person media channels, and offer his take on where the category is headed. Now here's my conversation with Chris. Hi Chris, thanks for joining us.
- [01:48]
C
Pleasure to be here. Thank you.
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B
So let's dive right in. About a year ago, Marriott officially launched its media network called Marriott Media. The timing is a little later than a lot of other networks, but Marriott had been dabbling in selling ads already. Can you talk about the rationale behind Marriott Media, how it's an evolution from what you guys offered before and how it's different from other networks?
- [02:13]
C
Yeah. Thank you. We are the first media network actually in the hospitality space to launch. And we're very different than the first wave of media networks which were predominantly surrounding the retail industry, where it made a lot of sense to extend into the digital sphere, the brands that people could buy off a shelf in a store. For us, we wanted to be far more thoughtful about that. And that really explained that long test period that we had. We, we wanted to respect the guest experience, the member experience of our Marriott Bonvoy program and understand how we could be most relevant to those, those guests and members. And that took a while for us to really get right. And so that testing period allowed us to learn how to bring it to life not only on our digital assets like Marriott.com and our and the Marriott Bonvoy app, but in the hotel room itself where we know, you know, we have this large dwell time of guests when they're there and a real openness and receptiveness to trying new things, which of course travel is all about. And we wanted to make sure we could tap into that in a highly sophisticated way, in a way that not only understood what our customers wanted to see, but also how we would bring brands to life in really productive ways for them.
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B
And how has this first year of operation been?
- [03:27]
C
Well, it's been a build. So it's been a hectic process of building out all the capabilities that are required for this. We are not an ad business by trade, so it took really a grounds up approach to build everything from the technology to the measurement to the team that goes out there and works with partners, collaborators we like to call them, who we bring their brand messaging to life. It's been a lot of learnings around how we are differentiated in the marketplace. As I said before, we're not a retailer. We're really falling to that commerce media network space. And really this is more about personalization, about inspiration and how we can be additive to that travel journey that people are on at every different stage. And that's really been the things that we've been focused on. And there's no better way to learn about those and how to bring them to life in the most positive way for both our collaborators and our members than actually having it in market and learning from it. So it's been a whirlwind for a year, but I started my career in the startup space 25 years ago and so it's been a real refreshing experience to get to build out a new business again.
- [04:35]
B
Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. When you say collaborators, are you referring to partners or are you referring to advertisers?
- [04:45]
C
Advertisers, right. So we from the beginning knew that we wanted to work with a curated set of advertisers and that we wouldn't just take out ads that they have and put them in our spaces. We wanted to collaborate with them on how to bring those to life in the most impactful and meaningful way, not only for them, but for our customers as well. So I'll give you a couple examples. One of our current advertisers is Visa. And Visa really wanted to drop drive the use of their cards in the international space. So we worked with them to bring a message around international travel And Visa being a trusted card to use for, for international travel when you're, when you're in other continents around the world. And we were able to jointly feature some of our great destinations where people might go. And that had significant impact with Visa driving both consideration that Visa is the best card to use for international travel and also actually booking international travel and international spending.
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B
Now you guys also work with United Airlines Media Network, which feels like something more unique to the travel space as opposed to the retail space which you were mentioning earlier because it's more like complementary for brands versus competition maybe. Can you walk us through how the partnership with United works for advertisers?
- [06:06]
C
Yeah. United and Marriott have had a long term partnership already where you can join accounts and, and move points back and forth. But really connective media, which is their media network, you know, is, is in a similar space. And when you think about the different stages of the travel journey, you know, there's the inspiration phase, there's the research phase, there's the planning stage, then there's the transit phase where United plays a huge role as well as in the inspiration phase. And then when they're actually on the ground, that's, that's where, you know, Marriott takes center stage. Overall strategy has really been to work with advertisers to understand the unique nature of each of those travel phases and tailor messaging for what they're saying to sort of fit each stage. And so we collaborate with United on understanding how each of those phases is different and how we bring to life those messages in impactful ways. And you know, clearly from an advertiser perspective, as you think about keeping your message top of mind with a customer throughout the travel cycle, that working with United allows us to sort of do that at more stages of the travel journey than we could, you know, by ourselves. And travelers tell us, you know, they're a very attractive audience for advertisers. They, you know, on average are about, you know, make about 40% more income than non travelers. They are making a significant number of purchases in and around travel, both leisure, but also to some extent for business travel as well. And this is a very, very powerful audience and you know, shared by our company and theirs with a lot of members in common. So we can just keep that messaging cohesive across the travel journey.
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B
So do you work with them on a campaign for advertisers or it's more kind of about the kind of research and making sure you're staying true to messaging.
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C
That's right, research. But you never know what the future
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B
might hold and roughly how many advertisers do you have on board now if you're allowed to say yeah we have
- [08:01]
C
dozens of advertisers and you know I can, I can give you a sort of representative sample of some of them. So you know you mentioned United, we have visas. I mentioned Resi, when you think about sort of reservations has been a big advertiser with us for food and restaurants. Simon Malls which is a high end mall operator. So we were able to do some very interesting things with geolocation around hotels that are in proximity to a Simon mall. And shopping of course is a big part of a lot of travelers experience. So that was very successful. Audible part of the Amazon empire basically having people with downtime in a room thinking about how they can listen to audiobooks. Dick's Sporting Goods, a lot of travel for us, our youth travel league so partnership with Dick's they also have a media network that we did a co advertising campaign on theirs and ours. Apple we helped launch the formula one movie F1 movie last year Starbucks, HarperCollins, Joy 101 which is Hoda Kotb's new sort of wellness service. So lots and lots of examples like that.
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B
Where are you seeing unexpected interest like from from what type of advertisers that maybe you couldn't have predicted or doesn't make a lot of sen from from the onset from on paper but actually does make sense further down the line and for what type of of campaigns Is there anything like that?
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C
Yeah, I think, I think we suspected this might be interesting but we weren't sure advertisers of this type would be interested which is in sort of the business services consulting software sort of company. So one of our advertisers is Adobe and those campaigns have proven to be quite successful and clearly they're targeted at business travelers. And this is another example where we collabor our advertisers. So the message was targeting business travelers, especially senior business executives when they're on the road in our hotels and talking about how Adobe AI can mind their business while they're on the road. So again tie into travel but that's been quite successful and the results have been pretty pronounced. One of the main things that we knew from the beginning that we had to build out retail media networks often have a direct correlation between an ad and a purchase. For us we have seen good results across the entire funnel but clearly upper funnel consideration awareness measures are one of our sweet spots as far as we're driving and we do extensive measurement capabilities with brand Lift studies, marketing mix modeling, tie ins, etc. To help brands understand that performance. And that was one of the things we wanted to differentiate all along was having robust measurement is I think, you know, one of the things that we're seeing in even some retail media networks is a lack of measurement sophistication. So we've been prioritizing that. We'll soon be instituting foot traffic tracking. So that allows for that Simon Malls example to help us understand that people actually flow into the mall and things like that.
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B
Yeah, I mean this kind of goes into what you were just talking about, but I'm wondering what advertisers are looking for in terms of how their needs have evolved as the landscape has grown more crowded and it's become this kind of must have channel for brands.
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C
Yeah, I mean one of the things that we again anticipated, but we now really see is, and this goes for almost every type of advertiser is the need to understand performance of their campaigns. And that comes back to what I just mentioned about measurement. Brands want to know what's the incremental sort of lift of their marketing spend if it's a lower funnel campaign. They want to understand if they're driving those brand awareness and consideration intent capabilities. And we have found that measurement almost is our best sales tool. Meaning that because it's a little bit unexpected in the space that we exist to provide that sophisticated measurement and we're adding more capabilities all the time to that, that that is proving to be the way in which when we work with an advertiser and we get a test budget to see if it works, we're able to provide that clarity and connection to the results and KPIs that they're doing, you know, our brand lift studies, I think a great example of that where we tailor those with each advertiser spec. It's not a standard survey, survey based tool and we work with them to understand what they're trying to what KPI they're trying to drive and how we would measure it.
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B
Yeah, it feels like measurement has been persistent challenge for retail media networks in general mostly because everyone's measuring different things. There's no standardization all of those issues. Is AI helping with that at all?
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C
Yeah, it's starting to come, you know, into play. Some of our measurement partners that we're utilizing have, have embedded, I think, you know, clearly as well, we want to collaborate again with those advertisers to tweak their messaging. So we're very excited and are testing into AI Creative so that we can Sort of create that very distinct creative and messaging, both video and static that comes to life in our properties and on our digital assets. And that's something that's going to reduce the cost and open up a lot of doors for us to be more relevant. I think the other way AI we're really excited about is of course we know that content production is often the great bottleneck that prevents people from creat. You know, specific insights can drive very specific understandings of what customer segments will respond to and AI can unlock that. And when you think about our business, what the other thing that really differentiates us is that we have this incredible member base of 270 million Bonvoy members that we have over 500 unique attributes. Not every customer has all 500, but we have up to 500. We have a direct relationship with our customers and we understand them very deeply. And Marriott Bonvoy, our loyalty program over the last many years has been positioning itself more as a passion based loyalty program that connects you to the things that you really care about and the true reasons that you travel. And we've really endeavored to understand, gain the trust of our customers to have them share that with us. As far as what they care about, why they're traveling, what are the, what are the, is it wellness, is it, is it culinary, is it sports that they travel? And we're able to bring that same asset to bear with all of our partners and collaborators. And that is really a differentiator for us. And that rich data is important that we can measure. And I think AI is the thing that will allow us to sort of take content messaging and targeting to a new level to tap into that rich data that we have. And that will yield far more meaningful results, I think than just a sort of blanket approach that many media networks take.
- [14:29]
B
What about the growing role of in person media? All the talk about the in store channel growing for retailers. You mentioned this earlier, kind of the hotel room and having a kind of a captive audience there. How are you guys approaching the brick and mortar aspect of the business?
- [14:49]
C
Yeah, we found that our in room channel, which comes to life with both video on the TV screen, we intermix advertising content with our own content. So that's one of the reasons that we care a lot about how it's coming to life and what those messages are and how we sort of ensure that relevancy to our customers. But on the TV screens in the hotels, those are running, when the hotel comes in, it welcomes the guest by name. We intermix Our content about the world of Marriott Bonvoy and where people can travel with this ad content. But we're actually now starting to branch beyond that in a couple of key ways. Still in the digital sphere, we think about public space screens and we're actually doing the FIFA World cup this year. Going to be testing public space screens in lobbies and in the restaurants and eventually even on the, on the sort of outside of buildings where there's digital screen space. That brings us into that digital out of home sphere as well and brings a new sort of dimension to that. And we're also starting to launch our second test around sampling. So that's bridging the physical and the digital world. This is something a lot of media networks that are solely in the digital space can't. But you can actually not only show a message about a product to our members and customers, but we can actually let them sample it in the hotel room itself in a variety of ways. So we're starting to lean into that as well. We think is a real differentiator to how people can experience your brand.
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B
Let's take a quick break for this message from our sponsor.
- [16:22]
A
This episode is sponsored by Kantar. Too often creative effectiveness is treated as a final check, not as a decision intelligence that helps shape campaigns while they're being built. Kantar's link changes that. Link is an end to end creative effectiveness system built for modern fast moving campaigns. It brings together deep human and cultural understanding. AI powered optimization and decision intelligence embedded directly into creative workflows drives stronger campaign performance and brand growth. With link by Kanto, visit try.kantar.com adage.
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B
So we're a few days away from the annual Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity. Do you typically attend and are you going this year?
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C
I am going this year and I've had a swear off all rose here for the last few days before we arrive because there's just too much of it there at Cannes. But we went for the first time last year and that's where we chose to launch Marriott Media. We'll be back this year with some exciting announcements about the growth of our business and really it's a centerpiece for us to have the world understand how differentiated we are in this space. We're still the only hotel media network and we are the largest hotel company in the world with over 10,000 hotels just in North America alone where we've launched. We have over a million rooms and 1.2 million screens in those rooms. So it's a huge amount of reach and we want to Carry that message about meeting travelers where they are and tapping into this very unique psychology of the traveler, where some of the research that we brought out at CES this year and with Connective Media, our partner, and we'll be featuring phase two of that this year at Cannes is really about understanding that psychology and how customers have this very open state of mind. They're inspired, they're joyful when they're traveling. And this really creates a willingness to embrace and, and be open to new messaging from brands. And that's really the breakthrough that we're seeing. The results we're seeing on those upper funnel measures for our advertisers are really remarkable. So we want to carry that message forward there. We'll also be partnering with Marriott Bonvoy, our loyalty program as well, which will be coming to life in some big ways there. We've had a great year with our sponsorship of the Formula One Mercedes team, who we've just won four races in a row. So we'll be doing some interesting things there with F1 and that team in particular. And we think it's a really way to get our message out there. And breaking through the C suite of all those brands that are attending.
- [18:56]
B
Yeah, there is so much chaos, so many attendees. Do you have any advice for first timers? Having been there for the first time just last year, how can newcomers get the most out of the week?
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C
Yeah, I think first and foremost, there are so many great panels that are so well attended and by very senior people at most of the world's brands. And, you know, getting a presence on those panels and bringing your message out there is super important. I think, you know, you can't understate the value of attending all of the receptions. The joke about the wine is that there's an endless number of receptions attended by people sponsored by so many great brands. You know, attending those and those one on one conversations are oftentimes the ones that really break through. It's such a concentrated focus on advertising. Media networks have really started to take on a massive presence at Cannes over the last five or so years. And, you know, it definitely pays off as far as having people understand that you're not only there, but how, how you're positioned and how you're differentiated. And of course, we spend a lot of time there with our partners, collaborators, understanding the upcoming year, what their, what their marketing strategies and objectives are. And we really start the process of planning with them at, and then continue through the fall as we set ourselves up for meeting their goals in 2027.
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B
And one more question before we go. Ad Age has started a new series called CMO Survival Guide that gives practical advice for chief marketers dealing with unprecedented change in the role. Is there one thing that has changed the most about the CMO job or your job in the past year that you would point to is kind of relevant here?
- [20:43]
C
Well, certainly you mentioned it earlier on the sort of capability side, it's certainly agentic and generative AI and how companies embrace that. It's very difficult for a CMO to sort of see through everybody. Every vendor out there is talking AI right now. Right. So it's very difficult to see through which ones are going to move the needle for you or not. I think for large companies it's important that you develop some key relationships with some of the, you know, the real breakthrough providers out there and then create the sandlot for your leaders to play in and build on. And then we did at Marriott a good two years of testing in this space and now really starting to scale enterprise AI at scale. I think secondly, the big transformation that is maybe a little longer than the last year, but has accelerated in the last year is the ability to measure your marketing dollars and the amount of companies that actually are measuring every penny and morphing their performance. So I think, think historically a lot of CMOs have planned out their following year, you know, in the late summer, fall and then they have this plan where everything's allocated. And now with performance marketing measurement, you're able to go into a year and be far more responsive to market conditions. And companies that aren't doing that I think are falling behind and they're not getting the most juice out of their dollars. And I think that's where again, we're seeing some success with, with Marriott Media in that we offer this very unique space that can be highly performant in parts of the funnel that, you know, this year we've seen this, a lot of companies pulling dollars out of their preset plans and putting them in there. And I think companies that have that flexibility and that companies that are measuring every last dollar is really like where marketing is going. And I think the profile of so many CMOs now is of this performance driven, data driven, tech enabled cmo more so than maybe your traditional brand creative cmo. And that's a real shift that I've seen.
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B
Well, Chris, we're out of time. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [22:41]
C
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
- [22:51]
B
That was Chris Norton, senior Vice President of Marketing capabilities and general manager at Marriott Media Network, and I'm Adrian Pascarelli, senior editor at Ad Age. I'd like to thank our producer, Lauren Ciardio, and invite you to subscribe to the Marketers Brief podcast on your favorite player. We promise to keep it brief, or at least short enough for your morning coffee. Thanks for tuning in.
- [23:12]
C
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