Airbnb acquires a meeting booking site, top digital publishers form an alliance, native advertising is the new digital frontier, TikTok takes Gen Z by storm and Uber is selling public transportation tickets. Read on for these new developments and more.

Leading short-term rental booking app ventures into the meeting space

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Imagine booking a meeting room anywhere in the world! Well, that may be a possibility, because rental giant Airbnb recently acquired Gaest, a booking site that helps people reserve off-site spaces for meetings and events. Bryan Murphy, CEO of Breather, an identical app to Gaest, remarked on the acquisition: “Experts predict that 30 percent or more of all urban office space, including meeting spaces, will be delivered as-a-service within the next 5 to 10 years, and Airbnb’s recent acquisition is a reflection of this large addressable opportunity.”

More apps are venturing into renting remote meeting locations. Will the rise of apps like Gaest and Breather affect how you’re marketing to business travelers?

Would you use an app for your business to book meetings in different spaces?

Top digital publishers form a media measurement alliance

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What constitutes as a successful result on digital media? Vice, Buzzfeed and Group Nine Media are teaming up with Tubular Labs, a social analytics firm, to create new standards for measuring social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook and much more. Instead of the common stats on views and clicks, advertisers want to see the value they get from influencing audiences. From this, publishers want to be able to show that a video could prompt viewers to further research a product or make a purchase.

How could you use this information to help your destination’s marketing strategy when calculating the success of your social media campaigns? How do you measure success digitally across social media platforms for a certain destination?

Native advertising is rapidly becoming the future of digital marketing

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According to Forbes, the advertising industry has been radically affected by Google and Facebook, which account for 63 percent of digital ad spend in the U.S. With such a significant allocation of advertising budgets going to digital ads, Forbes recommends that marketers should consider increasing their investment in Native Advertising, which is when “ads match the form and function of the existing content on a website or platform,” rather than traditional methods of digital advertising, such as website banners or popups, which have been proven by Nielsen research to be less engaging for younger audiences.

Is native advertising part of your destination’s marketing program?

TikTok is on the rise with Gen Z

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After Vine’s tragic demise, TikTok is dominating the app universe this year with the help of Gen Z. Formally known as Musical.ly, the app was bought by Bytedance in August 2018 and merged with its app, TikTok. Since the buyout, the app has skyrocketed with bizarre 15-second videos from its community. As a goal, users aspire to get a feature on the app’s “For You” page to be seen by the world. With a growing community, TikTok could be an ideal marketing tool for companies to use to reach younger demographics.

How can you incorporate short video approaches and influencers of this emerging trend into your marketing plan to increase tourism to your destination?

Uber takes public transportation to the next level

Photo Credit Uber

Popular ridesharing app Uber is offering a quick economical travel option that has been here all along: public transportation. As the company continues to lose money, they are planning to solve that issue by offering more modes of transit. Starting in Denver and then eventually going worldwide, this feature will allow Uber users to buy tickets inside the app at base price. Taking initiatives to be a good city partner, Uber also launched a new landing page for its hub cities to incorporate their public transit.

Ridesharing companies are going back to the start with transit. Would you use this as a strategy to reach visitors as an incentive for staying with your client?

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