But another carrier, Alaska Airlines, is moving forward with their advertising, although it's not on traditional tv or print media, but rather on the internet.
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"We believed in online advertising, but it was difficult for us to take a budget that was under pressure and carve off a piece from something we had decades of experience with -- print, radio and TV -- and bet it on something new," said Steve Jarvis, the airline's vice president of sales and customer experience.
Fast forward a couple of years. Alaska Airlines, opening service to major East Coast cities, has little brand recognition in the new markets. Blanketing those cities with traditional ads would be an expensive proposition.
That's when the airline began to work with Avenue A (now Avenue A/Razorfish), the Seattle interactive ad agency, on a more targeted online strategy. Alaska Airlines created "personalized" online ads for different kinds of customers, set up a social networking forum for group travelers and studied the behavior of visitors to the Web site to improve navigation and boost sales.
Alaska Airlines went from spending zero percent of its marketing budget on Web-based campaigns, to 15 percent today. The interactive strategy has taken a number of different forms.
The first stage was personalizing online advertisements through a process called third-party ad serving.
Alaska Airlines has made impressive gains on the Web. In 2001, the company booked $310 million in tickets online, about 16 percent of total ticket sales. Last year, online ticket sales grew to $865 million, about 35 percent of total sales. Alaska right now books about 40 percent of tickets online -- a bigger percentage than all other venues including call centers, online travel agencies such as Expedia and Travelocity, and traditional travel agencies.
Today, 70 percent of Alaska Airlines' new mileage plan members sign up online, compared to 38 percent five years ago.
Alaska is one of several companies experimenting with social networking. Many big industry players, however, are still taking a wait-and-see approach to the trend.
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