Priceline Says Online Ads Do Drive Branding

Priceline talked online marketing during its earnings call Tuesday. The travel advertiser was asked whether it might move money into brand advertising in Europe, rather than doing more Web advertising.

Responded President and CEO Jeff Boyd, “”We believe that we’re generating some significant brand equity through our online marketing and we really don’t have any plans at this point in time to spend a significant amount of money in offline branding. It’s very expensive and the complexity of the market makes it very difficult to efficiently roll out TV, radio campaigns and the like.””

CFO Bob Mylod continued, “[We] don’t view online advertising as pure dollar spend for customer acquisition. We think there’s a lot of branding components to the things that we do and so a lot of our initiatives are focused on getting customers who do business with us to repeat with us or to come directly to our website and that’s very, very important because it’s extremely competitive in the online advertising market in Europe.””

He went on to stress both the U.S. and European markets are competitive. “”We pay a lot of money to get these customers to come to our Web sites and so we have lots of conversion initiatives underway that have yielded some dividends and hopefully will continue to on an ongoing basis.””