Trailblazing Tactics: Campaign Wins, Learning Curves & KPI Mastery

Trailblaizing Tactics: Campaign Wins, Learninig Curves & KIP Mastery

Today's an amazing interview. We just finished it and I'm so sorry, I'm definitely gonna butcher her name, but I'm gonna try, it’s Barbara Puszkiewicz-Cimino.

In the conversation that we had I think it was about 40, 45 minutes, we talked about everything from attribution and the lack thereof to brand versus performance, to advertising and marketing for an attraction at Summit One Vanderbilt.

She's the Global Director of Marketing and CRM there and does an amazing job, and I'm excited for y'all to hear this. One more thing before we get started. I realize that most people don't know about the other assets and things that we do At Propell, we have two things. Number one is called the NavLog.

The NavLog is a biweekly email newsletter that goes out with everything that's new in travel marketing, think Morning Brew for Travel Marketing or Marketing Brew for Travel Marketing. And then also of course we've got the podcast. We've also got a blog on Propellic resources group where we're basically covering all of the new developments in AI and organic search visibility where there's a lot of change going on.

So be sure to check out those other resources. And with that being said, we'll dive right in with Barbara.

Super thrilled to have you here. I'd love the way that we, I just bumped into each other at a conference that neither of us necessarily had a lot of business being at

True.

No, but I think it was a great show and it reminded me that tourism needs to innovate. And one of the things that I absolutely love about you and just watching your LinkedIn is that you certainly are one of the types of people who isn't just sitting and waiting for other people to find things out, and you do adopt them five years later.

You are at the forefront of generally what I see in the space. So I'm curious, right now you obviously sit in a leadership position at Summit One Vanderbilt, you were at Merlin before that. How have you gotten to a point where you think about what interests you about preparing for the future of marketing?

Yeah, that's a good question. Thanks for having me first and foremost. I like to think of myself as an enthusiast for technology, and I always had a knack for trying things, pressing buttons to see what happens, hopefully nothing explodes. And that's been true thus far and throughout my career.

Early on I learned that taking things at face value, whether it's the conversations that you're having with people or the technology or especially the technology you need to be careful with that. Many examples that I could tell you what things look like on the front end and when we started digging into the platforms to the results, the numbers, to the way we track things, to the way we measure things, they turn out to be different.

And I think that's going of carrying me through my career, right? Always investigating, always looking what's in there, always looking behind the curtain to see. Okay, you're telling me great things, but what are you not telling me? And it's not that what you're not telling me is necessarily bad, but maybe for my business, maybe for what I'm trying to do, the what's not what you're not telling me is going to solve my situation.

I think there's a certain level of intellectual curiosity that it's funny and I've been on a soapbox about this lately. It's, it's just the there's so much changing in marketing right now across the board travel in any industry. How have you found, or are there any specific ways you've found to, I'm totally going off book, so I hope you're okay with that.

I'll come back to it. Let's, what happens? I'll come back to our agenda at some point. What how do you stay, how do you keep yourself educated and knowledgeable? Oh, great question. I like to sign up to many of the newsletters that I can find out there. So anything from just a simple Marketing Brew through Tech Brew, TLDR but also things like Bloomberg and similar media posts lately, it's been one that I've been paying attention to a lot. They have a very nice format of delivering the news and interesting you with what you're interested in and weeding out things that are not necessarily what you're looking for. So that's great.

Conventions, conferences, meeting people out there in the world, even not necessarily specifically in our industry, the travel and hospitality just going out there and learning, listening to how people do things what problems they're trying to solve that's really important. So I would say frankly, I probably have two jobs.

One mine, nine to five, although lately it's seven to five which is great. I can't complain. And the other one is anything before and after that when I'm trying to keep up with the industry and seeing what's out there.

You are preaching to the choir 100%.

Okay, so now I  will get back onto our agenda that we've preached.

So you've been doing marketing for a couple years and I'd imagine there's maybe a campaign or a project that might've stuck out that you're pretty proud of. Could you walk me through something that you think stands out? Yes. I'll take you back a few years to when I was still at Merlin Entertainment, we were about to open, or we were planning, working on opening the biggest LEGOLAND theme park in the world. Definitely heard of it. It's in Goshen it's a little called Lego Legoland, New York. And I happened to become in charge of their digital strategy. The way Merlin back then was set up, there's obviously I think headquarters in the uk. There's a new openings team that is divided between different brands that Melin has and that new openings team does not hire team for the specific attraction from the get-go. They very much utilized the central teams here.

And I happen to be  in the position of the CRM Senior CRM Manager for Northeast, so US and Canada and I expanded beyond it because we went into anything from digital media, obviously through email, we also looked after their website. We had this great idea because we already had locations

in the country and specifically Northeast the smaller attraction of Merlin, we were just going to start spreading the word. Obviously besides everything you hear on the news, we had a very big database of people that were already coming to our attractions. So we figured, hey, why not just sprinkle a few words here and there, right?

And start asking people if they're even interested in signing up to our own database. I do believe that building your database before going into market is pretty big thing. At the end of the day I have not seen yet a campaign where you don't do that and beat the ROI of a campaign when you do that.

So that was exciting. We spent

I'm curious,  so what, Summit One is fairly new, right? Was it how many years? Three and a half. Three and a half. Drum roll, 7 million people this week.

Whoa. Okay. Congrats . I'm curious though.

Thank you.

Because you, obviously Merlin had an existing CRM, that's what you oversee now.

Speaking to, before we come back to that specific campaign how would you go about build, like how do you build that list of people you want to get in touch with if it's a new launch?

Yeah, great question. So obviously, working with your brand side of the house and PR and getting your word out there throughout whatever media you want to put out there is essential.

But I'm a big believer in SEO although people say that SEO is dying right now. I feel like we're back into the days when everybody said was saying that email is dying, which clearly was not true. Maybe changes are happening but the efforts are still there. So positioning your your websites early on, right?

Getting yourself in front of  partners locally specifically. So for New York City, think timeout New York. Think bucket listers. Think secret. New York City. Just spread your word out there. Get people interested. Get people listening. And then don't forget, you have to give them a place to actually sign up to tell you that they're interested.

Is there something that you would like other than sign up for updates?

Has there ever been a prompt that has worked particularly well? Yes. So what we did for Legoland New York and what we're planning to do for the Paris location of Summit is it's not only sign up for updates, but we wanna give you a little bit of a story of who we are what you can expect. Maybe we can give you the opportunity of, hey, come to the opening. Something tangible at the end of the day for the people is important. Yeah, everybody wants update, but no, nobody really cares about them.

For New York what we did was we released a limited volume of what was called first to play  tickets. So say a year ahead of time, you could purchase a thousand tickets for people that can come in before the park even opens, play in the park, review it, tell other people what it feels like, and then after the park opens, come in whenever they want.

So those types of strategies is probably what we're going to look into. Got it. So going back to just that launch at the Legoland property, what was what were like, what channels did that marketing campaign go out on? What were the result? Yep. Still one of my proudest moments we ran a lead true lead generation campaign on social media.

So back then it was Facebook and Instagram. We had 16 different tactics that we were able to derive from the data, thankfully, that we had for other locations and other parks in the States, right? So we had people who just live in Utah and travel to California, or live in, I don't know, Ohio and travel to Florida, right?

But we also had  people who live in the Northeast and travel to both of those locations. So we were able to really do a call, interest targeting those types of things. I think we ended up having 94 different creatives for those 16 tactics

Wait, how long ago was this?

O 20, 20, 2018.

So this was where you could click a button and have 8,000 creatives. Okay. Oh, believe me, it was but that it comes down to do you love what you do? I grew up on Lego sets building with my family and learning myself how to be creative. And then you happen to find yourself working on that brand and your entire desk is covered with Lego sets.

So you don't mind spending your weekends to it.

What's the story of the rocket ship behind you?

The rocket ship?

That is Falcon nine. One of the SpaceX rockets. We already talked about me doing the zero gravity flight.  I am absolutely obsessed with space. If you could see my actual office, there's posters of rockets, there's Lego sets of spaceman.

I wanna go to space one day, so to your point, I'm manifesting. So I filled out a registration form for the Adventure Tourism Trade Association the other day, and they said, what category do you service? And it listed like adventure tours, it listed Overland, Cruise and it had space listed there.

Really?

Did you check that?

Yes, of course. I think it's within our lifetime. It's like I watched a video from 10 years ago. It was like I was one of the first nine commercial space tourists and now we've got, Katy Perry going to Space hashtag jealous which is the best takedown of the century.

So let's talk about it for a moment. I, years ago now, couple years at least, I was targeted with ads from Virgin  Galactic.

Okay.

Who are a little behind, I guess but still promising people. They had that cooler plane that is, looks like two planes. They don't have it yet, but that's what their plans are.

And they were like, Hey, do you wanna go to space? Sign up? Which kind of pick, pick my interests. And clearly I must be searching for a lot of things, space really related to get targeted by that ad. But then I go to the website. I go to sign up, there's no information about the pricing, schedules, nothing.

I sign up and I finally get an email and it's a lot of money just to put yourself on the list, right? And then much more to even go up there. So it was interesting for me to understand their targeting. I get that they probably, for people like myself, just wanna do the, FOMO and hype and spread the word rather than actually get me up there.

I was, it was fun too, for a moment.

I feel like you might also be flawed in assuming that the media buyers knew what their audience was. At least they should look for the income levels, right?

They  probably, here's the thing, they're probably using platform income, which is top 10% of zip codes.

And you're right in the middle of New York City.

So it's, that's the thing, like those income classifications on the upper end where you're talking about targeting people that have excess of a million dollars in income or excess of $5 million in assets, those like don't work has been our experience.

That's a while it's taken.

Yeah. And that's the thing that's one of the struggles with luxury travel. So anything else to say about the positive campaign before I start drilling into something that was a complete and utter failure? 26 cents on the dollar for a lead and sold out our first product.

So a person that gave us their email address. Okay. And then do you know what the impact was on actual sign actual registration from that, or was there data disconnect? When you say impact, what do you mean by that? How many or

of those leads that you generated for the email list of, from that campaign, who was actually bought tickets to the park?

Good question. Because also interesting part of the story is that the moment we went on sale and a month after I left the company.

Ah. 

So I wish I could look into this, just didn't have a chance.

Maybe you'll sneak a conversation.

But somebody did because we did sell out. So that's, I know.

That sounds great. I don't think I've heard of anybody that can get qualified signups for 26 cents. So clearly you did something right.

Back then. Yeah. Ah, before the privacy updates. You remember that? Yeah. Clicks on Google weren't $35 each for

I know. Or 500 depending on if you're in personal injury law.

So on the other end of the spectrum, one of the most humbling and favorite questions I ask is, what's the biggest campaign failure or something that didn't go as planned and what went wrong? Yeah. Listen, I like to say that it's not a failure, it's a learning moment. And that sounds so cliche. But for me, I'll go back to what I said earlier on.

And again, because I have knack to actually look deeper into the system to see how things are connected, how they're working what they're trying to present to us. And if they don't present truth to us, why is it that they  didn't? So a few years ago again, at my previous workplace, we were throwing an event year on year.

So first year it was a success. Everything went well. In the second year our. Signups to the event for which obviously you had to pay for, to get entry into just went absolutely to the level of almost nothing. And we were like, what did we do wrong? We pretty much executed, try to optimize, improve our strategy from the previous year a little bit.

So what is it that we are not seeing? What is that we didn't foresee and. As it turns out, it wasn't the campaign we actually did get the registration. It was that our data was telling us that it, that we didn't. So the connection between the platform where you were able to book the event and tracking of how you got there to book it, and the connection of our back then worked on Salesforce wasn't working.

Basically, this is what you're telling me is this could have still been a radical success, the world will just  never know.

Correct. So we're sitting there pulling our hair, why it didn't work, and as it turns out, it, we didn't, do the backend checks and things weren't connected.

So now we need to have a conversation around data integrity and tracking. Let's go. Oh, that's God. CRM, the CRM person. Of course. There's, that is such a, we have a rev ops consultant right now that we're working with just to clarify and solidify some of our data. And that has been one of our methodology points is track the bookings.

Everything is about the bookings, not the down, not the up funnel activity. And I a hundred percent agree that needs to be the first thing that's tested before anything is launched, is can we actually see the down funnel impact of this.

I'm curious from the tech standpoint, you clearly are at the front of a lot of what people are aware of and doing.

I'll go back to the SEO piece that you shared and say that yes, I think that SEO is still important. I think it's in the next six to twelve months gonna look entirely different, entirely. We've got about 45 clients on that service line, and we're completely redesigning it because it's. The fastest changing channel  right now.

I'm curious, similar to that technology and change, have there been any tools or things that you've been using lately that have been helpful with navigating the changes in the market? Or any tools that are particularly stand out that you would recommend for other travel marketers? I'll go back furious in time again.

To the moment where I was, I would find myself in rooms with leadership and bring up to them machine learning or AI, back 5, 6, 7 years ago. And it almost felt like I was just dropping a big cannonball in the middle of the room and everyone one was scattering away 'cause they were afraid of it.

So I changed my strategy and instead of saying those words, machine learning and AI, I started saying, let's try this new system that came to be and is looking promising to see if it's going to do anything for us. And then. Only after we prove it or not will we start naming it  for whatever it's. You're probably very familiar, I don't know what CRM you use, but on Salesforce many years ago they came up with Einstein.

Yep. And there are predictive analytics, simple things from the language you want to put in your content telling you before you even go into market, how people are going to respond to it based on the segment of your own data that you have. So you no longer have to go into an AB testing post-launch, you can try to figure out beforehand through understanding how people are going to react to your emotional tone in the copy. And lastly, simple thing, but being able to deploy the messaging to people based on the time that they are most likely to actually read it. Those three things. And still to this day I find key in the way we design our campaigns and we're lucky to find ourselves.

Having tools to be able to do that. And I think just one clarifying point is you don't need a quarter of a million dollar Salesforce  license to do that, there's so many other tools that are doing that. I can't think of any by name, but you could train a really good prompt and give it a really big context window in Gemini and tell it, here's what I want you to look at and put your messaging in and test it against the audience.

I agree. I think that's one of the beautiful things about what's happening with tech right now is it's getting so heavily democratized that most you'll pay for something that can change your workflows entirely is $20 a month. It's amazing.

Yep. We've come a long way.

A seriously long way. And now I will recognize after looking at our PNL for the past quarter, that $20 a month times 25 people, times 10 tools is a long number.

But I, it's okay. See, I'm the spender. I don't have to be, no, it's on the other side. I, you can ask my husband, I'm the spender too. Different context. I wanna pivot the conversation a little bit to something that's. Ti that's time tested and true and is not going anywhere anytime soon. Or brand versus  performance market.

There's the can go for it. Have fun.

Yeah. It wasn't until I got to work at Merlin and then now at Summit, that I start to realize, especially at Merlin with the Lego brand, how important a brand can be to a specific company or why it should be important. So here at Summit I had the pleasure to work with this great person Stacy Birman, she's moved on at this point, but she took her time to really educate me and go from: we can just take anything we want and throw it out there. We'll sell to, oh, hold on a second. What do we want to sell? Or do we want to actually also create some sort of connection with those people and ensure that they understand even though we change the creative that they're still looking at Summit down the road, right?

So I have to say my primary role obviously is in performance. I have to be selling tickets. But I  understand now the value of the brand in that performance marketing. And I know that yes I see it as two different funnels, right? You can have your awareness funnel where you're just spreading out there to the people, the world that you are out there.

So imagine, driving down the road and seeing a dealership, a Mercedes dealership, it's out there, but you're not in the market for Mercedes. So we're like, all right it's there. So that's your awareness. That's my brand building. And then the other funnel of the conversion, that still needs to include the awareness piece to it, right?

You're driving down the road. Now you are in the market for buying the car. So I'm gonna definitely target you because I know you're gonna come in tomorrow and buy that, right? So I'll see a result right away from you but I'll also hopefully gain something from the people on the brand side as well down.

I think that's one of the things that I've noticed in these conversations, this is like episode 40 something, I think, if I remember correctly, or 30 something. Is that the larger the brand gets, the more important they look at the more they recognize the power of brand. And I think that's a hint that smaller companies can  take is to maybe make your audience smaller and leverage brand a little more.

It'll bring down your cost per acquisition pretty meaningfully if you're doing it right.

Yeah.

We're talking about channels within those branded performance segments, like what have you found to be the best performance marketing channels for ticket sales?

Performance channels. Great question. Search, no, no question. Search ads. It's always been a search. Ads. I wish.

I wish, and I am happy that we had privacy changes on social, that's great, but back then it was much more powerful for us in terms of delivering results.

But one big thing, I don't know if, what do you think about it? I think within a year of me starting here at Summit, we tried connected tv.

We were lucky to get a brand new campaign that we shot in the space, which is beautiful footage and split it up and put it over there and very close in terms of performance ticket sales and within last batch attribution as well, believe it or not, to search. We noticed that. Yeah, we noticed that obviously.

You have to have really good  creative for connected tv. It's almost like you are in actual linear tv, so it's not as easy as go on search. And we did notice a drop off after a while, so we had two lines and that connected TV would start going down if we didn't update the creative itself, but second most powerful challenge for us in the beginning we were keeping it quiet and saying, oh my God, I hope nobody else discovers this channel because it's performing so well for us. It's still doing extremely well for us, and but I do.

Are you doing it like direct, are you using a network or what does that look like?

How do you distribute?

So we use MNTN.

Okay. Oh, cool. Ryan Reynolds.

Yeah.

Yeah. Which we've heard mixed reviews about people have different feelings, especially to the way they measure things. But hey, we see it last touch so we can complain, yes. Last touch.

Yes. I have things to say, but I'm, this is your time.

Say them. Please do. We don't rely on everything last touch, we're fully aware that we need to have a full funnel.

I maintain that  attribution is complete BS across the board. Oh God. If it was like if this was 10 years ago and you could actually see what was happening in a funnel.

I would be all in an attribution, but there has to be some sort of revolution. It's gonna be one of two things. One, I think that the whole world is gonna realize, okay, this is silly. We need to allow advertisers to see what they're able to do and at least somehow make that accessible. I find that to be very unlikely.

Or number two, we're just gonna forget about attribution altogether and go back to brand market, happy market.

Please, let's not do that. Let's try harder. Let's try one more time. Try harder, be better. Yeah. How do you go about right now? And what do you offer attribution with something like CTV would look at just like you do last click.

But I would also look at, or last touch, I would also look at incrementality for the audience. Yes. Yes. I think that's the biggest piece is that if you can actually see a lift, because that's the thing about CTV, it's a brand channel too. It's not just performance. Yep. And that's the reason you notice fatigue with having the same creative.

That's definitely not my area of  expertise. My expertise is gonna be on the digital not television side of things. Not not video consumption. But I've seen I have personally seen CTV work really well as a brand channel as well as performance. Though your performance feedback here saying it was your second best channel, that was a pretty cool feedback to hear.

And that's on Mountain or MNTN or whatever it's called. I'm curious what's number one?

Believe it or not, organic. Okay. Organic search is biggest growth year on year for us, which, especially in the climate that we change, that we find ourselves right now.

It's very surprising, but both impressions in search results as well as clicks and revenue. That's the thing. People, you can't check out, you can't buy activities or ticketed attractions through chat yet. That's changing very quickly with operators and things of that nature.

I'm curious though have you started to see any attribution from AI models? Oh, big time. Sweet. Tell me more. We, yeah, we work with the, awesome. I don't know if I can drop names here.

Yeah, please.

Inter  digital, awesome, awesome, SEO company.

Awesome.

So they started us very early on, then we set up Google Analytics to track attribution from, different platforms and it's cool. Can I just say that those platforms thought about adding the UTMs to their links so that we can actually track from it to that? There's no follow. So I, they're not passing a UTM in most cases, actually it was hilarious. So Google and AI overviews had a no refer, no opener tag by accident on their AI overviews.

So you literally, like it would show up as direct traffic but about three days ago, they were like, oops, that was an accident, and they removed that from the code base, so now you can't access it.

Really?

I didn't even notice that.

No. The referrer stuff it's based on the referring domain rather than just a UTM which like I would say it was weird to see that Google intentionally.

Was blocking their own reporting from showing that they were sending traffic. Why did they do that? Tell me It was an accident. They published, it was an accident. They got called out. I like, so this  is, again, we've got 45 clients in this service on organic search. It's, I've got an entire team that's all that we're doing is planning for the future of search and, building software and building tools around how we can both be visible and optimize with vector embeddings and all the buzzwords that I could possibly pull. But when it comes down to it, I think the core thing people need to understand is that you're gonna have search be not 10 blue links in probably six to 12 months, if not sooner.

What do you think of the AI mode? AI mode? It's interesting. It's a much better user experience than Google search, in my opinion. Really. And I've been doing SEO for 15 years, so I'm particularly, I'm the last person to say something like that. We're about to commission a study that I don't wanna talk too much about because I have a, I know a couple people that would like to do the same thing if they have the idea.

But ours will be out in August and it's going to follow it's gonna be a real user experience study of how people are interacting in travel when they're booking with AI overviews and AI mode. And there's a couple of cool organizations that are gonna be sponsoring and helping us distribute that from Phocuswright to Arival and a couple of travel companies.

 But it is the usage patterns that we're seeing show that AI overviews in AI mode, particularly AI mode, is far more engaging and retaining of an experience. I don't see any reason why Google would not switch to that. Do you think it's trustworthy right now? I think AI mode is much more trustworthy than AI overviews.

AI overviews you can trick it into making things up. There's actually this Mike King wrote a 12,000 word article that took me. I kid you not two and a half hours to read through at dinner. Because I had to read it like multiple times. Then I put it into Notebook lm, and I was like, make a podcast about this.

It's crazy. I'll send that to you after and we'll post it in the show notes. The Mike King article on the how people are using overviews. But there's research coming down the pike for that from Propellic in August as well, but enough about us. Back to you. So paid search does well for you.

How do you look at paid social as a channel? What is the purpose of paid social?

Paid social, depending what channels, meta,  so Instagram and Facebook still do very well. We're in, I would say top three, top five channels when it comes to performance, they help us out a lot in terms of spreading words.

So obviously Summit One Vanderbilt is experience that you can come in and see every single day of the year. But once in a while we'll have events. 4th of July is coming up, we'll probably throw something up for that. So meta platforms are very helpful in terms of spreading awareness of that.

Not to say all purchases off of ads for such events end up being the events purchases. There very much still regular tickets, which is fine. TikTok is interesting. Once we find the right person on TikTok, it's easier for us to convert that person than it is on meta, but it's much more difficult for us to find that right person on TikTok, we ran side by side tests where we attempted to trust the algorithm where they claim to have found purchasers versus our own  targeting and our own targeting always, in terms of performance marketing, in terms of selling tickets, it always deliver more. Pinterest was an interesting one.

Pinterest was on good days, even better than meta. But obviously we had trouble scaling, right? The audience, the volume of the audiences that we need is not necessarily there. So we play around. Right now we're looking into Reddit, which is exciting, I find myself on Reddit.

It has gotten a lot better. Yeah. The last couple of years. Yeah. So let's see what happens. But, we don't have organic presence already, so I'm a little worried about that. I know there are threads about Summit over there. But let's see what happens. We're gonna probably activate it. I'm excited.

Is, are the threads good or bad though?

Oh the threads, the ones I saw were mo mostly good. Yeah. The thing about the bad ones is Google has nav boost in their algorithm, which preferences things that people stay on and read longer. So the bad reviews typically get better rankings 'cause they're more juicy and interesting.

Really? Yeah. So NAV Boost, basically what it does is it will  it's a part of their algorithm that got exposed in a federal probe that basically shows when somebody dwells on a page longer before they bounce back to Google. That's a preferential ranking signal versus a page that they go to in return.

And that's heavily impactful in search rankings. And what would you read longer? A glowing positive review or a juicy negative review about the car witches and bugs and everything that was running around a hotel room. You know what? At some point, and not necessarily only in our industry, but even under videos on YouTube, wherever you go posts on any social media, once you see the first stop, bad reviews, you're like, all right, I know what this is about.

I'm leaving. So my thinking is, all right. I'm gonna go down the a hundred reviews or a hundred posts and be like, still talking about the same thing over and over again that is negative?

I get the point.

Yeah.

So I'm, yeah, that type of person. I'm just, I'm a drama person, so I'll see. No.

So what's the channel that you've tested? So you said you're testing TikTok. That's funny because you've  mentioned that it's so good. Oh, it's better when you choose your own targeting versus when you let them, which is ironic deeply because TikTok is known for the algorithm, but that's specifically there users I know, right? Not their advertiser side algorithm.

Yeah. Not for us.

We've had some TV shoots in the space, which was cool to hear our name and see our space in them. Obviously we partner with local brands like again, Timeout New York and similar we are probably, we probably say that we are built by New Yorkers for New Yorkers, so we try to stay in that realm.

We're also very still figuring out what our brand is and who the right partners are.

Do New Yorkers actually visit?

Yes. Yeah. And tell me more about that.

Tell me about that segment. Because that's a very interesting, like this is a very much a, New York is a place that people who have not been to the US go to, right?

Yeah. New York, Vegas the cities. So I can imagine it being incredibly drawing for somebody who's not  been to New York. And personally when I go to New York. I go to New York for work like five or six times a year. So I don't typically seek out an observation deck, although I did a couple months ago.

I'm curious what it's like with the New Yorkers though. I think the point of us trying to redefine the category and not only be an observation deck, but also in the art space that happens to be positioned in the space of your observation deck definitely helps us. We've put a lot of time, money, effort, blood, sweat, and tears into convincing New Yorkers, and we opened during the pandemic.

So nobody was traveling, everybody, coming out of the pandemic. So everybody was trying to do something without traveling for just yet. Once we did that. It's interesting, every single time any of those guests that visited that live in New York have somebody visit them, their family, their friends from anywhere in the world.

The first thing that they think about now is summit. So we'll, yeah. So we'll get them. We got them the first time, whatever that might have been,  and now they remember about us, and they'll come back and they'll bring people that are closest to them. And I think another good thing that works for us especially with people who are visiting people who live in New York City, is that, the greatest building in New York City that I can think about is surprise, empire State Building, right?

But people don't realize when you go to the Empire State Building, you don't see the Empire State Building. You are inside of it, but when you come to Summit, you have it in full, beautiful view. And I think it's the, it may be just the most beautiful view in this world.

Wow. There's a particular hotel that I'm in that I can see, I think I can see both.

I think in Madison Park. Can you see both? Madison Park?

Okay. Yeah. Should be able to, yeah.

You're facing. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Okay. Two more questions because I wanna be respectful of your time. CRM.

I'm gonna pivot over there. I wouldn't say that's a substantial portion of our listeners, but it's also interesting because the larger business gets, the more important your customer  data is because you need to be able to speak multiple messages to multiple people. How do you segment? Is it manual?

Is it automated? Is it a mix of both? A mix of both. But what I'm seeing here at Summit that I've never seen before in my career, in any of the attractions or tourism spaces that I've been, is, I call them sleepers. So you have your general new segment. People that just sign up, just found out about it.

They're very excited, they're most likely going to convert. Then you have your active people, which whatever that definition for you is, those are your true fans and they're always going to be there for you. But at Summit we have this quasi inactive segment of people throughout the entire world and that we've seen people visit from over 200 countries.

Territories already, which is amazing that are signed up but are not ready to be coming to New York City, therefore Summit. So they're just waiting. So a lot of times in those manual sense, the AHA deployments that we do to those  say in journal three segments, we'll see that inactive segments that will have

I can't really speak about open rates because those are useless right now, but barely any activity in there will make that segment, will make as much money as that active segment, which is much bigger and much more already.

You can actually like layer that on with external intent signals for when somebody like has travel intent and then target that person.

That's probably a much cheaper acquisition.

Yeah we use two platforms. We're testing Sojourn and Adara Yeah. To capture those who are coming in and very much using custom on it..

Yeah, I am. It's Sojourn recently started doing this on their as a meta pipe, they're opening it up to a few advertisers.

Oh my God. Let's talk about this, because I'm literally just setting this up. Have you tried it yet?

Yes.

Have you heard of it? How is it?

We will talk, we can talk about it after. Okay. We we use Adara for that, and I'll tell you, okay. I can follow up after and I'm gonna get a  call from somebody after this podcast.

'cause this actually has more than two listeners, which despite what I thought that we only had two listeners. It was two, one person that identified themselves last week and my mother of course but no

I love it. It's funny

We'll follow up on that on the third party intent targeting, because that is a really powerful thing for tourism activities specifically because tour's, activities, attractions are not the first thing purchased.

So you already have the flight, you already have the hotel, and you can come back and loop back and target that person. And if that person's in your CRM already, that's gonna be a very inexpensive customer acquisition 'cause you're already looking at a 20 or 30% media fee on top for those audiences anyway.

So you have to lower the cost. Sorry, I'm getting nerdy. Last question.

I love it.

What's your source of truth? Sorry. Sorry, go ahead. What? Before I ask that, oh, I was just gonna say, talk nerdy to me, please.

Oh my God, that was hilarious.

Oh boy. Before we go and start splicing this apart and making it into funny funny clips, which I hope to be able to do with this what is the source of truth that you use for booking  data?

Where are you looking and saying marketing is working versus is not working.

Yeah, that's a great question. And this really brings up my feelings about programmatic advertising, especially display types of things for the longest time and, that the platforms were just show us everything in green.

Yeah. We're selling everything. But then we wouldn't see the bottom line of the actual tickets sold, right? Or the increase or any sort of impact. So we take what we sell. We slice it into different categories. Obviously we sell B2B, things like Viator, Expedia, Get Your Guide. That's a separate pile.

And then everything else comes from the website. And then we track the lift in those sales. I'm in the numbers day in and day out, then it's probably, bad for you because not much sometimes can change every single day. But we do something in the platform, we give it a little bit of time, we look whether there was a lift and if there was a lift. Was there a similar lift last year when we didn't do anything? So overlaying the data year  on year, even though we don't have much data because we're only three and a half years old, everything we do, and sometimes people just tell me that I'm a broken record.

Everything we do comes down to how many tickets did we sell, or was there an uplift even when you think about traditional media, which is a separate topic for me, very interesting topic. But even if we go out, even if we go out with advertising on like links and digital display boards, whatever that may be.

We try to tie that into any sort of lift or show or find out if there was any.

Do you have an incrementality or model that you use? How are you studying that?

It's all done manually and through brilliant minds of our data scientists internally. But we're, we will also once in a while throw in actual live surveys on site so as you are lining up to summit and especially if we're trying to do something new that we've never done to create that lift we'll go up there and we'll say, how'd you find out about us? What  convince you to? Have you seen this ad? And then, we'll do statistical significant audience and everybody says, no, I've never seen it, never heard of it.

It's probably didn't work for us.

Yeah. Cool.

Those sort of things. That's awesome. I love that. It's fun.

I probably interview companies anywhere from 5 million in sales to 2 billion in sales on this podcast, and it's so interesting to hear the varying levels of marketing evolution and sophistication.

Clearly you your organization very much cares about tracking and attribution and making sure that the work you're doing is driving an outcome, which I unfortunately can't say about even necessarily more than half of travel brands or tourism related brands. So good for y'all. I'm happy that we've crossed paths and we're connected.

I think that for anybody who is not connected with you or following you on LinkedIn, they should be. If it's okay with you, I'd love to drop your LinkedIn profile in our show notes.

Thank you. Love that.

Anything else you wanna share? Anything you wanna make sure that  the two or three people listening to this get out of it?

Let's not get stuck in old ways. Let's be okay trying new things. Yeah.

That's what I would say. That's that echoes the, if you do 10 things and one of them works, it was worth it.

I agree. Even if none of them work, you've ruled some things out, right?

Yep. Exactly.

You're bad marketer. No, I'm kidding.

Eventually you will roll all of it out and the only thing that's left is what's working, so that's good too. This was awesome. Thank you so much, Barbara, for joining me and I look forward to getting to know you better.

Thank you, and I hope to see you soon.

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