Best Western Hotels & Resorts drives 89% incremental reach with live sports

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE 

Diving into live sports to boost campaign reach

Best Western Hotels & Resorts boasts a global network of approximately 4,300 properties across more than 100 countries and territories. Its “Life’s a Trip” campaign celebrated the roller coaster of real life while making the most of every journey. To bring this campaign to audiences across the U.S., Best Western worked with PMG and tapped into one of the top forms of entertainment: live sports. 

The campaign’s main goal was to drive incremental reach through tentpole live sports moments that capture massive live audiences. The media buying team wanted to take advantage of multiple content streams, efficiently navigate time zones, and access live sports inventory from sources beyond its traditional linear direct strategy. That’s why the team turned to The Trade Desk — as our platform offers advertisers private marketplace (PMP) biddable access to all the action. 

SOLUTION 

Programmatically accessing audiences watching live sports

Through our platform, live sports are accessible to advertisers programmatically. Best Western and PMG used our platform to bid on inventory from multiple connected TV (CTV) PMPs. This allowed the brand to reach audiences across different time zones — activating against both live and replay coverage.

PMG further used our Audience Predictor lookalike modeling tool to identify the most relevant audiences who were similar to Best Western’s existing customers. To measure the impact of these targeting strategies on incremental reach, the team leveraged our platform-integrated measurement partner, iSpot. 

RESULTS

Boosting campaign reach and driving conversions

By leveraging multiple PMPs with different types of sports content, Best Western reached over 2.3 million households — 89% of which had not been previously reached on linear TV. 

The “Life’s a Trip” campaign yielded a 2 times higher conversion rate (hotel bookings) among viewers who saw its ads during live sports CTV moments. Reporting tools showed that these impressions yielded greater efficiency: Viewers needed 3% fewer impressions on average to convert than other genres of CTV programming. 

Best Western and PMG plan to continue aligning the brand with upcoming major live sports events across CTV to drive reach — and ultimately, conversions — for their campaigns. 

Ready to scale your next programmatic campaign with live sports? Contact us or reach out to your account manager at The Trade Desk today.