Q&A: Meliá Hotels’ Marketing VP on Transforming the Brand, Along With Its Digital Strategy

Meliá isn’t necessarily niche. With 370 hotels located in 43 countries across four continents, Meliá is tasked not only with complying with the changing landscape of digital, but also with the evolving privacy laws that come with them. With the European Union readying to enact its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May, Riego Corujedo and every other European marketer is thinking about how better to use data without overstepping the ever-shifting boundaries.

“This is something that is really going to change the way we work,” he said. “This is clear. And what is clear as well is if the cookies and information of the customer is used in the right way to present the right offer, it’s good, no?”

Riego Corujedo talked with Adweek about how Meliá’s digital presence has changed over the past three years and what has been planned for its brands in 2018.

Adweek: How are you using technology to personalize experiences for guests?
Manuel Riego Corujedo: We use technology to look at data, and then to make it actionable, giving personalized experiences. We use all the signals that the customer has given us—like what the customer is doing on our page, after they visit our page, what this customer is buying when he’s coming to the hotel, if he’s coming by leisure or traveling with family—to create customer profiles to customize the experience both in the moment of booking, but as well as when they stay.

Meliá Hotels marketing vp Manuel Riego

Is this internally built or do you work with external companies?
We work with a variety of companies. For example, we work with typical companies such as Google and Facebook to bring new customers, but also with cookie companies like Rocket Fuel [Rocket Fuel was acquired by Sizmek] and other DSPs that provide a lot of information. Two years ago, we used to go to companies to buy data about customers, but we were missing some, so we built our own DMP with our own team to buy programmatic marketing on our own.

How has this helped performance?
It’s helping quite a lot. Two or three years ago, the shares of our own channels for revenue was around 10 or 15 percent, and today we are aiming to get 40 percent of revenue share through Meliá channels. … We have measured that through our own DMP and trading desk, and we are able to increase our return on investment by about 20 percent.

When you’re thinking about your own digital presence, how has that shifted? Where do you guys run ads these days?
We used to work very much offline, but today, 80 percent of our marketing investment is programmatic and this 80 percent of the investment is going internally. Internally doesn’t meant that we have our own DSP. We work with different DSPs. For example, we work with DBM, which is Google’s DSP, and that’s one of the major sources of revenue for the company. But 80 percent of revenue is programmatic, which is a very big change.

What is your biggest challenge this year?
They are each different, but I will talk about three.

The first one is talent. We talk a lot about technology, but at the end of the day, people are behind technology. In the past, our conventional marketing departments were competing with other corporate changes, but today we are competing in a broader environment.

Secondly, the technology itself. We have systems that have some legacy, and sometimes changes with loyalty take time. And on the other hand we’ve made big investments in the past, and everything changes so quickly that if you don’t have flexibility you can have problems.

And the last one has to to with the organization. Transformations are not just with a department, but with a whole company. If a leadership team is going one way but other departments are going the other way, transformation is hard. So we need to be careful with talent, with technology and with the whole culture of the company.