Travel Texas Partners with AdTheorent, Proof Advertising to Drive Bookings

AdTheorent, Inc., a digital advertising company using machine learning technology and solutions, and Proof Advertising, an Austin-Based full service ad agency, announce campaign results from the "Travel Texas FY 2019" mobile advertising campaign. The goal of the campaign was to drive engagement across the "Millennial" and "Gen X" targets, ultimately encouraging visitation to Texas.

To drive high impact awareness while showcasing Texas highlights, AdTheorent's Studio A\T created two custom 360° Rich Media gyrosphere units (one designed for each of the Gen X and Millennial audiences).  The purpose of the creative was to highlight passion points for each audience and entice travelers to learn more about Travel Texas.  In order to create a fully immersive 360° gyroscope experience without associated video production investments, an equi-rectangular image was created by stitching together multiple images.  This experience was paired with hot-spot vertical videos highlighting the breadth and depth of activities that Texas has to offer. Users can navigate within the 360° view between different activities by either swiping or moving their device, accessing videos, a gallery and other materials.

To identify the target audience of people interested in activities taking place in Texas and to inform targeting, AdTheorent utilized a custom AdTheorent Audience Builder capability.  AdTheorent's Audience Builder leveraged elegant live-poll ad units to identify a deterministic audience of engaged "hand-raisers" interested in traveling to Texas.

AdTheorent used the attributes and characteristics of responding consumers to build a Predictive Audience, after which AdTheorent's machine learning platform identified the consumers within that audience who were most likely to convert, leading to smarter optimizations and better performance results.

As a result of the campaign, Travel to Texas was positively impacted:

• 25% arrival lift based on ad exposure to non-Texans.
• 2:1 return on ad spend based solely on tracked hotel revenue (not measuring spend in market, etc.)
• 38% conversion rate based on visiting key pages of TravelTexas.com

Additionally, one of the key goals for the 360° mobile creative was to garner rich media engagement. The 360° video unit encouraged very high in-unit engagement rates, with a large volume of actions related to the gyroscope functionality, suggesting interest.  Overall, engagement rate was 22%, which is 4.5X higher than the mobile interstitial average.  Average time spent in unit was 67% higher than the industry average.