The Holiday Inn® brand was now able to work with their media partner to ensure the online advertising was sent directly to this large, identified target group. When the campaign went live, they could use cookies to make sure the Holiday Inn® brand advertisements appeared on the websites these people visited as they browsed the internet.

Holiday Inn® Hotels monitored the campaign’s success in real time. Immediately they were able to see that more people were interacting and clicking on the mind-set targeted ads than through other, more traditional targeting methods. More spend was quickly shifted towards the mind-set targeted advertising resulting in the campaign being extended from 30 days to 12 weeks.

The strength of this approach was in changing the ‘undecided’ into ‘decided’. Holiday Inn® Hotels tracked the broad campaign to measure its success. The results were very impressive. They saw that those exposed to the advertising were 38% more likely to consider staying at Holiday Inn® Hotels than an identical control group.

According to the Holiday Inn brand, in addition to the 38% consideration lift, the campaign drove a 514% lift in actual bookings via their site, proving that marketers can directly drive sales with ad targeting based on this approach.

Just as media has transformed marketing to become all about the individual, Holiday Inn® Hotels understood that targeting an audience effectively and successfully means taking the individual into account as well. Not just what demographic they fall into.

By considering, and understanding, the mind-set of the individual, the Holiday Inn® brand was able to ensure that they were reaching more people who were more likely to stay with them the next time they booked a hotel. This same approach will be used in the brand’s 2015 digital advertising campaign.

Firstly we had to identify people who were open to stay at Holiday Inn® Hotels. If you just look at what people do and what they buy, it’s impossible to work this out. So we started by asking 10,000 frequent travellers five questions. Their responses were then put through a tested algorithm that has the ability to predict how likely they are to buy a brand in the future with an extremely high degree of accuracy (R=0.92). We were then able to identify 2,100 people that were open to stay with Holiday Inn® Hotels, but weren’t necessarily already choosing to stay there.

Given the size of the planned Holiday Inn® Brand digital marketing campaign 2,100 people with this specific mind-set was far too small. We had to scale this group so we could target far more, and really impact sales for Holiday Inn® Hotels.

To do this, we needed to do something called look-alike modelling.

Data cooperatives source information from thousands of retailers across the US and build a giant database of people. Working with one of the largest in the US, we took the 2,100 people that we had identified and analysed the database to find out what their behaviours were. What products they buy? What music they listen to? What magazines they read? And much, much more.

With this information, we had a greater understanding of what made these people unique. The look-alike model allowed us to find others within this huge database that matched their profile. This meant we could increase the mind-set target from the 2,100 people we had identified through the five questions, into 15 million people. 15 million people that shared the same profile of mind-set and behaviour. 15 million that were more likely to be open to staying at Holiday Inn® Hotels.