What you need to know:

• Independent publisher Concrete Playground making a play for more travel ad budgets and a cut of sales by becoming online travel agent via Concrete Playground Trips.
• Aims to take a bigger slice of acquisition budgets from paid search and social and prove attribution through purchase data.
• If it works in travel, other verticals could be next.

The aim is to harness existing content to feed the travel business, while harnessing purchase data – which to date Concrete Playground has been “passing off to bars, restaurants and ticketing platforms”, per Founder and Director, Rich Fogarty. “We want to own the data and the customer relationship – and travel is our fastest growing vertical.”

Which makes it the natural start point for what may end up being a larger commerce play.

The plan is to harness Concrete Playgound’s content and team to “curate experiences based on research and interest – what's resonating with our readers at the time,” said Fogarty.  Concrete Playground Trips initially launches with packages around Australia and New Zealand, though the firm is also working on bringing Japan into the fold, “which is at the top of our audience’s destination list”.

But domestic demand is huge. Per a survey of 7,500 readers, “50 per cent of Australians are planning on doing more domestic trips this year and 31 per cent of Gen Z audiences and 30 per cent of Millennials are booking trips to de-stress,” said Fogarty. “But the traditional bucket list has shifted: For our audience, 70 per cent are saying they prefer to go off the beaten track and 74 per cent say they want to 'live like a local' rather than seeing more popular spots domestically.”

One challenge is meeting pent-up demand, with the hospitality industry seemingly suffering long Covid and airlines struggling to return to normal service. Hence Concrete Playground aligning with tech platform Travlr, which powers the travel site and bookings – and provides a branded customer service function, something the publisher would struggle to manage.

Search and social raid

Interest from marketers is also high. Concrete Playground teased CP Trips at the Digital Publisher Alliance Upfronts earlier this month. 

“We're working more deeply with a lot of tourism operators now. From an awareness perspective, this allows us to work with them in an acquisition capacity as well. That opens up more budget for us to try and do more with – because we can be full funnel; we’re essentially driving people from inspiration all the way through to action.”

He said travel advertisers also grasp the “trust and credibility publishers can provide and the power of publishers to drive acquisition in a different, and sometimes much more cost effective way than paid search or social, which is ultimately what a lot of them are relying heavily on.”

Meanwhile, Concrete Playground aims to retarget its circa 150,000 logged-in users and 140,000 email subscribers to boost conversion rates and is now mulling investment in a customer data platform (CDP) to better enable that approach.

Either way, Fogarty said the Travlr platform investment “has already washed its face” due to “the increased briefs and responses” that have landed with the publisher since focusing more heavily on travel. As such, he thinks getting into the travel operator game is a triple win – stronger publishing revenue from travel advertisers, a circa 20 per cent margin from trips booked through the platform, and the prospect of significant purchase data to boot – which should keep re-feeding the commerce machine, potentially across broader verticals.

“We’ll be able to prove the value of our travel campaigns, because we know if we are converting or not. Hopefully that will prove the rest of the model to drive transactions,” said Fogarty. “So it’s [ultimately] not just travel-focused but lifestyle-focused, and there is power there.”