Rick Mulia

Touted as an industry first, the platform enables advertisers to select users shopping for travel by country of origin and destination, following their content journeys on-site and re-targeting them off-site. Or as the company said in its press release the platform is “following the people, not the places.”

Heading the initiative is Rick Mulia, vice president media and advertising solutions, who recently joined Wego from related media roles at Microsoft and MSN.

“Clients want more targeted buys, with better ROIs and less waste. Wego’s new Audience Engagement Platform, designed to follow people, not places, plays to Wego’s strengths and provides a quality audience with high travel intent. We know it will perform,” he said.

Hotel chains, for example, focussed on travellers searching specific destinations can extend their campaigns to sequence marketing messages to those individuals outside of the Wego network.

Re-marketing to previous Wego users shopping for travel is another new powerful capability, said Mulia.

He has also packaged Creative Services with the new platform to offer full campaign management consulting.

“We have vast experience when it comes to the travel purchasing funnel and can make a significant difference by sharing our knowledge with other online advertisers.”

The Audience Engagement Platform serves hotels and airlines, but is expected to attract other travel-related service providers like credit card companies, insurers and telcos.

“Starting with re-targeting, re-marketing and audience extension campaigns we will go deeper with our segmenting capabilities, selecting users for their business class or family travel plans, even their preference for a hotel chain, frequent flyer or hotel star rating,” Mulia added.

The audience includes users of all 52 customised Wego sites in 30 languages around the world, a community that currently generates bookings of over $1.2 billion per quarter, the aggregated value of transactions the company passes to its travel partners.

Wego is rolling out the new technology during the Ad Trading Summit in Singapore this week, as the first clients go live over the Wego network