Continental Airlines Goes Spanish

January 13, 2006

By Elizabeth Lloyd

DMO's chief marketing officer believes online travel companies with global growth and revenue strategies should target emerging markets and populations.

The online travel industry and multicultural marketing

PhoCusWright's "Online Travel Overview: Market Size and Forecasts 2004-2006" estimates that the travel industry will see greater growth in 2006 than in previous years. Online travel will see its share of this growing industry rise, as well. As a result, PhoCusWright predicts that 2006 will see one-third of all U.S. travel booked online, up from 20 percent in 2003 and 15 percent in 2002.

Within the travel market, we're seeing the level of interest, and money, being invested in U.S. ethnic markets exploding. The census data has been important in validating the size and potential (and high growth rates) of U.S. ethnic markets. Where before a major brand may have tactically implemented ethnic marketing on a local level, it will now target those markets on the national level and invest in longer-term brand marketing as well as tactical campaigns.

As travel marketers try to target ethnic and international markets, many turn to the internet. More traditional brand marketers are asking for the creation of websites to reach these audiences. On June 30, 2004, Southwest Airlines launched a Spanish-language booking site that targets the 39 million U.S. Hispanics.

Continental Airlines' Spanish website

Like Southwest, Continental Airlines has recently announced a partnership with Idiom Technologies -- a leading independent provider of scalable software solutions for accelerating and optimizing globalization initiatives -- to speed the launch of its Spanish language online reservations system.

According to Ken Penny, director of internet planning and general manager at continental.com, "Continental Airlines serves more destinations in Latin America than any other U.S. airline. Offering website services, like flight purchase and frequent flyer information, in Spanish facilitates the travel process for more of our customers in the United States and abroad. Recent surveys (such as the Roper Hispanic Cyberstudy released in early July 2005) indicate that U.S. Hispanics was the fastest growing online ethnic segment. Also, this ambition was consistent with Continental's Latinization program, now in its eighth year, which enhances customer service for Latin American and U.S. Spanish-speaking passengers not just through language but in respecting cultural differences.

With the internet helping to create a truly global market, more and more businesses are realizing they need software like WorldServer to tap into this market and to reach customers who want to access information and make purchases in their native languages.

Dave Rosenblund, spokesperson for Idiom Technologies, stated, "The plan to launch a Spanish-language website came directly from the CEO of Continental, who laid out an extremely aggressive launch schedule. The overall goal was to more effectively target consumer and business travelers in multiple languages and locales. To complete this project, Continental needed globalization software that could quickly, easily and cost-effectively automate many of the manual processes involved with translation and localization. After evaluating various alternatives, WorldServer proved to be the ideal solution. Using WorldServer, they were able to translate key components of their online reservation system -- including the flight booking and rewards system, along with billing, check-out and travel history features -- and successfully get these customer-facing sites up and running within the allotted time."

There is no uncertainty why Continental chose to pursue the U.S. Hispanic market.

The Direct Marketing Association recently released the 2005 Hispanic Market Report that highlighted three significant facts for marketers:

• U.S. Census projections indicate that the Hispanic population will triple to over 102 million by 2050.
• Hispanic-Americans are increasing in affluence and are among the most credit-worthy customers in the United States
• Hispanic-Americans have a purchasing power currently greater than 600 billion U.S. dollars and this is expected to grow to one trillion U.S. dollars by 2007.

According to Penny, " With the growing Hispanic population in the United States, we're seeing a real opportunity to reach more effectively the audience who prefers websites that provide Spanish-language content. The real challenge is to increase awareness of the Spanish language facilities of continental.com among Spanish speakers."

Aggressively expanding Spanish language outreach to the U.S. Hispanic market, as well as to the Latin American market, is what will make companies such as Continental key players in the online travel space.

It is evident that online travel and online marketing opportunities are starting to explode in the U.S. Hispanic and Spanish-speaking verticals. Continental's success can be attributed to its simple approach to website localization: mandate that all creative ideas be applicable across all communication channels and across different markets.

Elizabeth M. Lloyd is chief marketing officer of Dragon Media Online, Inc., a leading international marketing services company that has developed world-class, performance-driven online marketing solutions and best-of-breed email database management -- all designed to monetize international and multicultural markets. Lloyd's work on international online marketing has been highlighted in numerous publications as well as in academic curricula for MBA international marketing programs worldwide.

FEEDING THE CONSUMER BEAST, ONE MEDIA AT A TIME

Demanding Boomers, Multitasking Gen Yers Decide What, How and When

By Greg Lindsay Adage.com

Published: January 03, 2006

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Wayne and Tyna Donelson, 56 and 54, don't have much time for most mass media. A married pair of small-business owners who work from home in rural Massachusetts, they subscribe to the local paper and a few magazines, rent DVDs voraciously and, thanks to Comcast's video-on-demand package, watch yet another movie together every afternoon.

Photo: Paul Sakuma

"I don't need anything else out there," Ms. Donelson says.

Her daughter, Louisa, is more succinct. "F--k TV," the 22-year-old senior at the Rhode Island School of Design says in her Friendster profile.

Louisa doesn't have much time for other media either, unless you count her perpetual text messaging, wireless Web surfing and downloading torrents of music to her Apple iBook.

Redefining media usage
Although they aren't aware of it, the Donelsons are helping redefine media usage each in his or her own, uniquely generational way. They're unconsciously guided by the principles that PricewaterhouseCoopers claims will rattle the media landscape over the second half of the decade: They only want their media when they want it, how they want it and in whatever quantities they want it.

While Louisa's boomer parents are reinventing Hollywood as a DVD factory, she and her friends in Generation Y are running traditional distribution channels through a blender, watching TV on iPods, discovering new music on MySpace.com and then texting each other about it on their cellphones.

Americans in 2006 will consume, on average, more than 9.5 hours of media daily and pay $888 in the course of the year for media options ranging from magazine subscriptions to DVDs, according to the forecast of Veronis Suhler Stevenson.

That breaks down to a media day devoted to about 4.3 hours of TV, 2.7 hours of radio and satellite radio, and roughly a half-hour each of the Internet, newspapers and music CDs. And we'll still find time to watch DVDs, play video games, and read books and magazines, not to mention spend more minutes fiddling with our cellphones. By 2009, we'll add another 10 minutes of media consumption a day, thanks to finely honed multitasking skills.

Less time with ad-backed media
By 2009, marketers will have increased their annual media support by $100 billion from 10 years earlier, according to Veronis Suhler. But this generous ad support won't stop consumers from spending less time with ad-supported media. Consumer time spent with ad-backed outlets is expected to fall to 54.1% from 63.6% of their total media time.

In the first half of this decade, consumers increased their media spending at a faster rate than advertisers did, and they'll keep spending long after the average American breaks the $1,000-a-year barrier in '09.

Where's the money headed? To Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store, which maintains a viselike (70%) grip on the digital-music market with its 99-cent song downloads. To cellular carriers for $2.49 ringtones and video games. To video game makers Microsoft Corp. and Sony Corp. To satellite radio services like Sirius, Howard Stern's new home as of this week. And not to mention broadband service providers.

There still will be a few ad-supported constants in this brave new media world -- somehow, we'll find the time to watch even more TV -- but even the mass-est medium of all will bow to our whims, thanks to DVRs and video-on-demand.

There are presumed to be plenty of losers as well -- anyone stuck burning CDs, for example, or publishing newspapers.

What's driving the change behind the change? It's too easy, and wrong, to chalk it up to "technological disruption." (Microsoft's WebTV was once disruptive, too.) Consumers already wanted control; right now, they're embracing the media for which technology has finally made it an option.

'Nation of control freaks'
"We're becoming a nation of control freaks, and it's all technology's fault," says trend watcher Michael Tchong, who points to the "ubertrend" of "time compression" as the culprit.

"Media companies need to start changing their models to adjust for this," says Peter Winkler, marketing director in PricewaterhouseCoopers's entertainment and media practice. "A lot is just experimentation" -- witness the recent flurry of TV shows-on-your-iPod/PC/DVR announcements -- "but we're going to see more content on a pay-per-view basis, which in reality will become an ad-per-view basis. Consumers may not pay for much of that content themselves, but they'll accept the ads."

Time Warner's America Online is betting exactly that with its new ad-supported streaming video channel In2TV. That may be one tactic for marketers to get back into the game, but they shouldn't stress themselves out over the technology.

For technology isn't the common factor shared by the media that Veronis Suhler and others have anointed the winners -- interactive TV and wireless content, home-video options like DVDs, video games, digital cable and the Internet. Demography is.

Reshaped by two generations
The media landscape of the next five years will be reshaped by the whims of Gen Y and their boomer parents (while Gen Xers, as always, will be overshadowed by the two).

The youngest generation will be the focus of technological innovation, while the boomers may prove to be a wild card for no- or slow-growth media increasingly written off by advertisers because of their aging audiences.

Boomers represent "a huge segment, they've been treated specially their whole lives, and they have lots and lots of money to spend," says Mike Hess, director-global research and consumer insights at Omnicom Group's OMD, New York.

And how is all of this likely to play out? Well, Gen Y already comprises the bulk of all text-message senders and ringtone downloaders, despite owning the fewest cellphones of any generation. They're inveterate video-gamers, causing young men to begin abandoning movies, TV and magazines for pixilated worlds at home and forcing marketers to chase them there.

And Gen Y's tendency to hang out at virtual clubhouses like MySpace and Flickr -- where they produce their own blogs, share photos and invent a parallel universe of their content -- is propelling Internet ad growth at a 20% annual clip. (Thus explaining the $580 million News Corp. paid for MySpace owner Intermix Media.)

Mom and Dad reinvent Hollywood
Gen Y's parents, meanwhile, are staying home to watch movies. They're behind the reinvention of Hollywood's business model as a giant DVD machine and causing the collapse of the theatrical window (because they can't be bothered to head to the theaters). They're the target customers of the telcos and cable companies racing to bundle every conceivable service.

Boomers' coming to grips with mortality was the reason that religion was the fastest-growing book segment in 2004. (Who do you think bought 25 million copies of "The Purpose-Driven Life"?)

And, as it happens, boomers play games, too. Electronic Arts, with its $680 million acquisition of cellphone-game maker Jamdat, is positioned to pursue the swarms who while away the hours playing games like poker on their computers and handsets.

One might muster a million examples to show why demography is destiny when it comes to media usage this decade. The surging number of Gen Y Hispanics even underlies the recent boom in newspapers and magazines aimed at the ethnic group.

Mr. Tchong is correct when he declares "technology has spoiled the consumer and made it into a beast looking for customization." The media challenge will be figuring out exactly how America's youngest and aging members want to be fed.

Forrester Sees Online Sales Through 2010 Rising

Dec 28, 05

Consumers’ love of online research and purchasing convenience is fueling online retail sales growth, according to a report released by Forrester Research Inc.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based market research company is predicting that North American online consumer sales, including auctions and travel, will hit US$329 billion in 2010 -- a cumulative average growth rate over the next five years of 14 percent. The latest sales forecast is $13 billion higher than Forrester predicted in September 2004.

Online sales this year should total $172 billion, with holiday sales shaping up well, according to another research firm, comScore Networks Inc. in Reston, Va. It said that online sales, excluding travel, were up 23 percent to $12.75 billion over the prior year for the 39-day period ended Dec. 9.

The percentage of U.S. households shopping online is expected to grow from 39 percent this year to 48 percent in 2010, and Forrester predicts that revenues will continue to grow because online shoppers tend to have more money. And, driven by the convenience of being able to research and buy online at the same time, buyers are expanding their online shopping activities.

"The Web makes many specific shopping-related activities easier than before -- activities that become routine for customers and ultimately lead to a purchase," wrote Carrie A. Johnson, an analyst at Forrester.

The market research firm expects 13 percent of all sales will be done online by 2010, with computer hardware and software, already big sellers online, expected to remain popular.more than half of those products, 54 percent, will be bought online by 2010 for sales that will total $17 billion, predicts Forrester.

One of the fastest-growing categories is likely to be travel: Online travel revenues are expected to double between 2005 and 2010 to $119.1 billion -- comprising 46 percent of all sales, online and off-line. Other categories in which consumers will buy heavily online by 2010 include tickets, books, consumer electronics, small appliances, gifts, cosmetics and fragrances, linens, music and video products, and video games.

Traveling toward SEO

December 19, 2005

iCrossing's director of industry relations explains why optimizing search keywords is mission critical for the travel industry.

Recently, I traveled to Geneva to chair a UN Conference on Trade and Development Expert Meeting on information and communication technology (ICT) and tourism for development.

It's a mouthful of a phrase for a conference that comprised a rather extensive spread of topics.

Broadly speaking, the meeting -- which included representatives from industry, government agencies and non-governmental institutions from both developed and developing countries -- departed from two ordinary assumptions:

1. As consumers' online experience increases, they are more likely to research travel information and buy travel online
2. Through more extensive use of ICT, the world's least developed countries can capture a larger portion of the revenue streams that might otherwise go to third-party distributors, aggregators and tour operators.

The themes of the conference got me thinking. The fact of the matter is that the issues faced by destination marketing organizations (DMOs) in developing countries are not all that different than the challenges travel suppliers and aggregators here have to contend with.

At a base level, all share the goal of "making winning connections," a theme I have been developing on iCrossing's Reverse Direct Marketing blog over the past several months.

Of course, to think that search engine optimization (SEO) will be the answer for developing country DMOs is far-fetched, but SEO is and should be a key element of any travel company or organization's overall marketing strategy, a conclusion that will come as little surprise to readers of iMedia Connection.

Why is optimizing for the right keywords so important for companies in the travel industry? Several prominent reasons immediately come to mind.

For one, data from a comScore study commissioned by DoubleClick indicates that online travel shoppers conduct an average of six relevant travel-related searches in the three months preceding any transaction, with 77 percent of these searches based on generic terms (as opposed to merchants' brand names).

Second, a considerably higher proportion of travel shoppers (73 percent, according to comScore/DoubleClick) perform relevant searches in the 12 weeks prior to completing a purchase online than buyers of computer hardware, apparel and sports and fitness goods.

Third, for online travel shoppers, 55 percent of the searching activity takes place two or more weeks prior to purchase, making the ability to track the latency effect of paramount importance.

One way to measure the impact of consumers' travel-related search habits on an optimization campaign is by developing visibility indices for a set of industry-specific keywords. By gathering all relevant information on the position of a given non-branded keyword and calculating it against the major search engines, the estimated number of monthly searches and competitors' position on the same keyword (using the same formula), it is possible to determine an index or ranking for each individual travel keyword as well as an overall index for all the keywords selected for optimization for a group of companies in a competitive set.

This overall index demonstrates the visibility of a company, on a sliding scale for a set of keywords, where a score of one signifies high visibility for natural search and a score of greater than three indicates dominance.

A quick look at the data iCrossing has collected for the hospitality sector, for example, reveals that generic, non-branded terms such as "luxury hotel" rank high in terms of estimated monthly searches (close to 120,000) as well as in proportion to the total number of search users (close to 20 percent), but low in terms of overall visibility (not higher than 0.25 for any company in the competitive set).

By contrast, a more specific term like "New York luxury hotel" generates a far lower number of searches (just 1,514 per month), representing just two percent of searches, but delivers a much higher page ranking on the major search engines, with a visibility score that reaches as high as 2.73. Looking at visibility results for a broad set of keywords can, in turn, help to define a roadmap for optimization targets and avenues for targeting competitors.

Capturing consumer eyeballs and dollars is especially acute in light of the fact that according to iCrossing's September 2005 "How America Searches: Online Shopping" study, conducted in conjunction with Harris Interactive, 72 percent of online adults now purchase travel online more than offline. Decreasing margins on online travel purchases have accompanied this trend toward increased use of the internet for travel research and booking.

Travel aggregators such as Expedia and Travelocity, which appear to be losing ground to direct suppliers, stand to gain the most from increased keyword visibility.

As a final thought, data collected by my former colleagues at eMarketer indicate that growth in the online travel market continues to be robust, with 2005 bookings up over 20 percent from last year and revenues forecast to rise to more than $60 billion. In such a competitive environment, no company, great or small, can afford to lose a sale, least of all due to a failure to appear prominently in relevant search rankings.

NIELSEN DELIVERS FIRST WAVE OF OUT-OF-HOME DEMOGRAPHIC DATA
Men 35-54 and Women 18-34 Most Likely to See Outdoor Ads December 06, 2005

Source

Photo2Search: Explore the Real World via Camera Phone

By Rob Knies

There’s a new restaurant in town. Wonder what people are saying about it?

Take a photo.

That handy gadget you’ve been coveting is on sale at the mall. How does its price compare to those offered elsewhere?

Snap a picture.

A new, blockbuster movie arrives at your local theater. Thumbs up, or thumbs down?

Point and shoot.

It can’t be that easy, can it? Xing Xie says that, yes, it can.

Xie, a researcher for the Web Search and Mining group within Microsoft Research Asia, is working on technology called Photo2Search, which is designed to provide information on the go for users of camera phones.

“As the old saying goes,” Xie says, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Maybe more, actually. Photo2Search gives users a way to search a Web-based database by using nothing more than an image captured by a cellphone equipped with a digital camera.

“This technology,” Xie says, “aims to solve the problem of mapping a physical-world object to a digital-world object. You see an object in the physical world, and you want to know the corresponding information in the digital world—for example, its price on the Web, user comments, or Web sites. There are many different solutions. You can use a bar code or radio-frequency identification. But using a picture of the object is very convenient and very easy to deploy.”

The easy part is the key. Camera phones are simple to use, but the process of text-based search on them is not. That realization provided the late-2004 genesis for Phone2Search.

“At that time,” Xie recalls, “the idea was very simple: Use a camera phone to do a Web search. This is very interesting, because inputting images is much more convenient than inputting text queries on a small device.”

Photo2Search works like this: Seeking information about something seen, a user takes a photo of the object and sends the photo, via e-mail or Multimedia Messaging Service, to a Web-based server, which searches an image database for matches. The server then delivers database information—whether it be a Web page featuring the object in the photo or information associated with the object—to the user, who can act on the information received: read a menu, enter a gallery, book a hotel room, make a purchase.

Sounds simple, right? The devil, as always, is in the details.

When Xie, who collaborated on the Photo2Search technology with some Microsoft Research Asia colleagues and a handful of visiting students, first developed his concept of image-based Web searching using photos captured using camera phones, most prior work in this area had been based on Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) approaches, which index the content of images by features such as color, texture, shape, object layout, and edge direction. But while such approaches, which take considerable computational resources, are able to identify photos with some similar visual features, they don’t necessarily excel at locating ones with the same prominent object or scene pictured in a query image.

“We found,” Xie says, “the precision of CBIR is not sufficient for practical use.”

Then he turned to computer-vision techniques, but again, challenges arose.

“We found speed is a very big concern,” he says. “Most computer-vision algorithms are slow.”

In the second half of 2005, Xie and colleagues rebuilt the system, with image matching based on some well-known computer-vision algorithms that extract features from images. That choice proved productive, resulting in an efficient, high-dimensional index that can search through a large image database and return results quickly—combing through a collection of 6,000 images and delivering matches in a mere three seconds using a common laptop. At that point, the process begins to enter the realm of the practical.

The searchable database still needs to be a predefined collection of images, but they can be harvested from the Web. Manual annotation and organization are then employed to enhance performance.

The promise of Xie’s technology is significant. The burgeoning consumer adoption of camera phones offers the potential for much richer Web queries, using, in addition to text, the use of images, voices, even video.

In a paper entitled “Photo-to-Search: Using Camera Phones to Inquire of the Surrounding World,” to be delivered in Japan in May during the upcoming seventh International Conference on Mobile Data Management, Xie and co-authors Mingjing Li and Wei-Ying Ma, both of Microsoft Research Asia, and Menglei Jia and Xin Fan of the University of Science and Technology of China, underscore how important camera phones could become in searching via mobile devices.

“The value of camera phones on daily information acquisition has not been sufficiently recognized by the wireless industry and researchers,” the authors state. “With necessary technologies, they [could] become a powerful tool to acquire … information [about] the surrounding world on the go.”

In an increasingly device-filled world, that could prove a boon to millions.

“The coolest thing,” Xie says, “is that you can use a pure image as a query, with no text. That is a totally new search experience.”

And further refinements are forthcoming.

“We will continue to work on efficiency and to support larger databases,” Xie says. “We hope, in the future, when a user submits a photo to, for example, MSN Spaces®, we can quickly figure out the latitude and the longitude of that photo by using our technology.”

It remains to be seen how Photo2Search might be incorporated into an upcoming product, but the possibilities are intriguing.

“There is still a lot to do to make this technology into products,” Xie cautions, adding, “If we can make it practical, then this is a big contribution for both local-search and mobile-search products.”

Click for Source

Growing online industry will still have to try harder

Online sales continue to go up but the industry will have to compete even harder in the future to capture individual travelers, says Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer senior analyst. "With most US travelers are already using the internet, online travel distributors will compete more aggressively for their business," said Mr Grau. US leisure/unmanaged business travel sales will total $78 billion this year, up over 20% from the prior year, according to Mr Grau's study called "Online Travel in the US: Pursuing Customer Loyalty." Online travelers are an "affluent and highly educated segment" of users who visit multiple sites to learn about destinations, find the best rates and book reservations," he said. These travelers are technology savvy and less price sensitive than general leisure travelers, he added. "Online travelers will increasingly rely on social technologies such as RSS, blogs, customer reviews and wikis to plan trips," he said. The strong economy and more enthusiastic attitudes about flying have fueled a recent surge in spending, but a softening economy and high energy costs could depress travel spending in the near future, according to Mr Grau.