Latin American and APAC markets have 'exploded' over last couple of years, says Hotels.com's Michael DeHart
The Latin American and Asia-Pacific (APAC) markets have “exoloded” over the last two years and are now becoming a major source of both traffic and bookings, according to Hotels.com’s senior mobile marketing manager Michael DeHart.
Interviewed by The Drum's online editor, Stephen Lepitak, at the IAB’s Mobile Engage conference in London, DeHart said that while the US and Europe continued to be major drivers, the market in Latin America and APAC was exciting and had shown significant growth particularly over the last year.
“As a global business, we’re in four major regions – the US, Europe, APAC and Latin America,” he said. “In the US and Europe it’s definitely a growing and major part of traffic, but looking at Latin America and APAC it’s just exploded over the last couple of years, especially in the last year.
“It’s become a major source of not just traffic but bookings for us.”
Earlier at the day’s event, psychologist Dr Simon Hampton urged marketers to change the way they think about mobile advertising following freshly released figures from the IAB that showed nearly half of the UK’s top FMCG brands still don’t have a mobile-friendly site.
According to DeHart, when it comes to mobile advertising simple mistakes are still being made and brands and agencies have more to learn.
“A good example of one of the mistakes is I’ll get a banner ad in another app when I’m already travelling for another travel app,” he said.
“At that point, you’ve already lost as a customer because you need to get it to them before they travel. It’s about understanding that intent before they travel.
“I think you have to understand what the customer is looking for on which device at what time,” he added. “We reach out to customers, we get feedback in app stores and other places, and we aggregate all this data and use it to make sure we’re giving them the right information at the right time.”