The Priceline Group, which has Europe-based Booking.com as its major growth driver, intends to soon put Booking.com on TV in 30 countries, and that’s up from just 12 in 2016.
The company plans to increase spending on TV by 55 percent, CFO Daniel Finnegan said, adding that the larger spend on television will occur over the next few quarters and have an adverse impact return on investment in the short term.
The increased spend on TV advertising would come at the expense of some digital advertising. It would pressure margins, particularly in the seasonally slower next two quarters, Priceline Group CEO Glenn Fogel conceded during the company’s third quarter earnings call Monday.
It’s no small thing that the Priceline Group plans on leaning more on TV, and would presumably rein in a percentage of its spend on digital advertising. Skift Research estimated in September that Priceline’s digital ad spend in 2017 was on pace to reach $4.3 billion, with the biggest chunk of that going to Google. Booking.com is widely seen to be the biggest travel advertiser on Google.
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