• by Masha Geller , September 11, 2003

When Wyndham Hotels decided on a mission of increasing revenue, room nights, and overall reservation numbers at 20 different Wyndham hotels and resorts spread throughout Florida, Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean, they called on the Range Online Media agency for help. In turn, since the production budget was tight, Range opted to utilize Flash-based PointRoll ads.

Rich media on a tight budget? As most advertisers know, the two don't always belong in the same sentence, but the combination worked for Range.

"We were not only trying to maximize each resort's digital budget but we were also trying to evenly distribute coverage for numerous properties," said Cheryle Pingel, Range Co-founder and CEO, and PointRoll was "an excellent solution."

"We were able to showcase the offerings of each resort, brand Wyndham as a whole and create a cool, fun and unusual user experience."

One of the sites Range bought was Weather.com because they were able to target the feeder markets of each resort property. "Wyndham has a keen understanding of their clientele and they know the feeder markets that flock to certain resort locations," Pigel explained. "Weather provided a great arena to target these users and we were extremely pleased with the campaign."

The results seem to speak for themselves. Through its PointRoll campaign, Wyndham is averaging nearly five reservations, 10 room nights, and more than $1,600 in revenue per day. By campaign's end, an estimated 30,000 people will have clicked through to the Wyndham.com site. More than 100,000 people per day in key feeder markets are being exposed to Wyndham properties. After 28 days and only 2.9 million impressions, Range reported a return on investment of 88.36%. The campaign calls for more than 6.4 million impressions, enabling Range to project an ROI of 195.66% at its completion.

Andrew Jordan, Wyndham's Executive VP of Sales & Marketing and Chief Marketing Officer, said, "Because Point Roll lets us broadcast numerous messages in one space, we can now leverage one ad unit with several different property-specific messages. In addition, the cost of the ad space can now be distributed across numerous properties, creating more synergies within our brand while driving our ability to place even more advertising."

He said that through the use of PointRoll's technology, they were able to create advertising that "could be narrowed to the most relevant message based on the user's own explicit preferences. Instead of one broad message, the user is presented with options where they can choose to receive messages about a specific property or destination. In effect, the ad message becomes two-fold: an opening brand message, with the option of a more narrow, property-specific message."