• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, October 29, 2013

Ad retargeting firm Sociomantic on Tuesday announced a partnership with Revenue Management Systems that will bring airline, hotel, and other travel-related inventory data to the Sociomantic platform. The partnership will allow travel advertisers to reach consumers via real-time bidding (RTB) with personalized display ads online, on mobile devices, and on Facebook.

Sociomantic has a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The company claims that most CRM platforms "push predefined offers to a limited number of broad audience segments," which they say "fails to fully recognize or address the needs of either the traveler or the travel service provider."

A Sociomantic representative explained how the partnership will work. "The gist of it is that airline inventory data will be pulled into the Sociomantic platform to create ads that combine three sets [of] information in real-time: what a customer is interested in (searching for trips to Paris for example), what is known about the customer (they're a gold level frequent flyer, always flies business on flights over five hours, etc.) and what the carrier knows about their inventory (there are plenty of unsold seats to Paris in March)." Marketers can then use that information to create personalized ads.

The rep claimed that the airline industry hasn't had the ability to do this before, and added that the partnership will "transform revenue management from a system for managing inbound demand to one able to generate new demand."

A second Sociomantic representative said, "Adding the airline data…to RTB is going to make a major change. For most companies, that kind of data is backend stuff [and] never factored into the digital marketing mix."