Travel marketing company Sojern opens first Australian office
Travel marketing company Sojern has opened its first Australian office, to be led by Chris Greenwood, director of sales.
The announcement:
Sojern, travel’s leading performance marketing engine, today announced the opening of its new Sydney office, with Chris Greenwood, a veteran of the digital industry, at its helm as director of sales. The new office will serve new and existing clients in the Australia and New Zealand region, including Visit Australia and Air New Zealand.
Sojern brings its specialised data set of 350 million global traveler profiles, including billions of search intent and predictive purchase signals, to help brands reach the affluent traveler audience and drive direct bookings to their websites and mobile apps. The company delivered 5.5 million booking transactions worth over $3B in revenue for its clients last year.
Chris Greenwood brings 17 years of digital experience in the local markets across multiple platforms, most recently at Quantcast. Previously, he built the regional office of AdMaxim and held strategic leadership roles at DoubleClick, Yahoo, News Corp and Fairfax Media.
“I’m very excited to bring Sojern’s long-standing expertise in understanding traveler audiences and delivering exceptional results for clients directly to service the growing Australia and New Zealand markets,” said Greenwood.
“In a digital landscape crowded with generic programmatic offerings, Sojern stands out with a highly specialised solution set tailored for the unique needs of travel marketers — from global enterprise brands to independent hotel properties. With both Australia leisure tourism growing by 13.7% and APAC airline passenger demand increasing 8.3% Y/Y, our region’s travel brands need industry-leading solutions and expertise to help them win customers and build long-term brand loyalty.”
Sojern expands into the broader market from its Singapore hub at a time when digital advertising spend is growing at a rapid clip: according to a recent Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Australia and PWC Online Advertising Expenditure Report, total local online advertising spend had reached $1.88 billion at the end of September, a year-on-year growth of 20.3 percent.
Thanks to Australia’s strong local tourism boards, massive appetite for domestic travel (Sydney to Melbourne is the fourth busiest travel route in the world) and proximity to the booming Asian market, a sizeable portion of the digital ad spend comes from travel advertisers.
Sojern is the first and only marketing company specialising in travel to become a DoubleClick Certified Marketing Partner. Thanks to this elite partner status, Sojern’s clients have preferred status for inclusion in DoubleClick’s alpha and beta product test programs, early access to the latest enhancements in DoubleClick’s bidding and platform innovations, and rich audience insights combining Sojern’s global traveler profile behavioural data with DoubleClick campaign data.
Sojern’s expansion in the Asia-Pacific markets comes on the heels of explosive growth globally. The company has expanded its headcount to 250 globally, reported strong growth and financial results, and was recently ranked on Entrepreneur Magazine’s 2017 Top Company Cultures list.
Source: Sojern.
Excellent Chris. Seems like a very good opportunity in a fast growing niche. Great match.
Best of luck
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All the best Chris.
I’m sure the team will enjoy your guidance here in Australia.
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The numbers and impressive, or are they.
1. 350m traveller profiles. That is every 20th person on the planet. Just seems a bit high to me. Maybe they have spent some serious money buying profiles.
2. 5.5m bookings last year. So 1.6% (one-in-60) of the profiles booked travel last year. And that is assuming each person booking, booked only once in the year.
3. $3b value of bookings. So the average booking was $545 per active booker per annum. That could be one or two domestic flights, or maybe a couple of nights in a hotel room.
But all in all, good luck to them and I hope it is a success.
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@AbacusMan – if you factor in the number of frequent business travellers globally, retired / semi retired many of whom who take multiple trips per year and then add family short breaks and long breaks around school hols 3 – 4 times / year it all starts to add up.
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All the best Chris – look forward to hearing all about it once you’ve settled in 🙂
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Good on you Chris. Great to see you guys are kicking goals ??
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