Hello,

Holidays are starting in Europe. Scheduling things around annual leaves is becoming a thing. Less news and so forth. Am looking forward to the break myself. Planning a road trip in Italy with the family. I’ll try to keep the newsletter next week but I wont promise anything.

Best, Martin

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Branding and Art and Beauty

A NY Agency Wørks argues that brands need to integrate art into their branding and that they should become patrons of the arts etc. I don’t necessarily agree on all points but I do agree that too many marketers focus solely on performance metrics, neglecting the power of brand building through creativity, art, and beauty. When we put a butterfly on the home page of a hotel analytics company there was no real reason for it other than that it was beautiful. And it worked just for that reason.

BRANDS EMBRACING CREATIVITY

Paper faster than connected tech

Last week’s edition of 10Minutes News featured Marc Fancourt arguing that in the past, one could check in within two minutes, while today it takes much more time. And some people want to put guests in front of self-check-in kiosks to do it themselves. It’s funny to see how tech in this case hasn’t made things easier for either guests or staff. Before we saw staff scribbling notes on a piece of paper and moving papers around, we could see that they were actually working. Now they’re staring at a screen, clicking on keys. While we wonder: “has our reservation been lost, or is the hotel overbooked?” It’s interesting to see how this is evolved (or not).

WE GIVE UP

About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I'm also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry.  

Google SEO Matter but differently

There is a lot of random information on how to rank in the age of AI. Mostly opinions and still very little actual data. But this research has a lot of actual data. Worth a read if you’re trying to get your website to rank well. Recommended reading for any marketing person. Plus an additional post based on Neil Patel’s research.

GOOGLE SEO AND AI + AI SEO STRATEGY

ADR Obsessions vs. your Brand

So much can be said about optimizing for ADR, but in the end, it really comes down to creating a great product. There are some simple tips that can be applied, and this post covers six great tips that hotels should apply to growing their ADR through their brand instead of despite their brand.

HOTEL ADR STRATEGY

Independent Hotels Outshining OTAs with AI

I believe there is a possibility for hotels and hotel websites to outshine OTAs in the age of AI because with their websites they can put much more granular, much more detailed, much more information about their hotel and all the tiny details that can’t be present on an OTA. So maybe this is the time for hotels to really invest in their websites.

INDEPENDENT HOTELS AI STRATEGY

Is Personalization in Hotels Overrated?

Hyper-personalization in hotels is a complicated problem that I’m not sure AI can solve on its own. When we travel, we travel with different purposes, and it’s really hard for systems to know the purpose. If I’m traveling for work, I want the regular. I want things that are the same everywhere. I want the club sandwich; I just want to get something done. I want efficiency. When I’m traveling with my family, I want something else. When I’m traveling with my wife, I want something else again. So is hyper-personalization really the goal, or should people just have should hotels just have a strong vision and execute.

HOTEL PERSONALIZATION DEBATE

Podcast: I was invited to talk about AI in hospitality on this podcast, along with many other great industry thought leaders. A great discussion, we didn't agree on everything. Which made it more interesting.  

Opinion

How to Spot an Agency That Actually Delivers

So many times when I have hired an agency, or been hired by a client the first thing that happens is “Let’s make a plan.” Cue the Gantt charts, multi-step roadmaps, and nicely color-coded slides. When this happens, chances are, it will become a long and expensive affair with limited results.

It is such an expected behavior that recently the board of a company I presented to were disappointed that I didn’t show up with a massive planning deck. I told them the majority of the plan is in the agreement, the rest of it we’ll need to figure out. We can either start a 3 month research project to figure things out, or we start a 3 month scrappy test and learn phase and figure things out. One of those two is most likely to come up with a workable model for them.

Plans are often just educated guesses. You don’t know what’s going to work until you see something actually working. That’s why my first recommendation when evaluating an agency: don’t let them start by building a plan. Ask them to start by doing. Can they drive leads in scrappy manner with the resources they have? Are they street smart or are they just going to ask for more budget and resources? (the latter is a dead giveaway).

It’s not that planning is bad, it’s that execution is what you’re paying for. I once read a line from an almond farmer in California, that stuck with me it went something like: confusion is resolved through action. Many problems are confusing, the marketing of a company is full of confusion, which channels, what is the message, how does the product work, who are the personas, what does the brand really mean, advertising tool du jour etc. The best way to see if your agency (or consultant) will be good is – do they get something done fast, that produces some kind of results, and then adjust.

Stick to one metric, something concrete like leads or products sold. It is easy to get fooled with metrics, cherry picking that one KPI-of-the-month that looks good. I’ve seen it happen so many times, including getting fooled into those presentations (only to discover that the main KPIs were 30% down which was conveniently missing).

If after some weeks they still have not come up with any results, it’s probably not a great agency. And I mean actual results – leads that go into the pipeline or products sold (for e-commerce) – not emails sent out or open rates.

Most agencies are really good at selling themselves and produce thought leadership content. It is hard to verify what they say, versus what actually did. So, if the first meetings went well, go with it. Sign up but include an exit clause after a few months if you don’t see some immediate and scrappy results.

In the trial period, ask them to focus only on getting results on their own. Support them, but can they built a scrappy landing page or re-use one you had? Launch an ad? Iterate on it? Do they even suggest to do this?

They’re going to learn more about your ideal customer profile, what works, what gets leads and where the customer’s attention is by doing that than by planning yet another roadmap. When you’re done with this phase, both you and they now have a much better data to write a real plan.

Anyone can make a marketing plan. GPT can do that. The question is: can they make something work? Do they have the competence to understand what went wrong when there are no results, and can they rapidly switch the plan to get some results?

Execution over strategy. Always.

People will say this is fine for a scrappy startup but it doesn’t work for a big company and a big project. I’ll argue that you always want to work with people who bring you results rather than plans and excuses.

• Designing with style in Midjourney, 17 tips – Link

• The Jacquemus effect part II – Link

• Hospitality Design Trends Benchmark – Link⁺

• The Guest Experience Benchmark Q2 2025 – Link⁺

⁺ Note, articles that are published by companies or people I work with are tagged with the ⁺ symbol or Partner word. I’m adding this as a transparency. Previously I avoiding sharing content from partners to remain objective, but sometimes they have excellent articles that deserves being shared so to remain transparent, I’ll tag them.