Thrillist’s new LGBTQ+ travel channel aims to extend Pride Month ad budgets throughout the year

By Kayleigh Barber

The advent of travel post-vaccine rollouts, plus the return of Pride Month media spending has convened into an opportunity for both travel marketers and media brands alike. Marketers are voicing support for groups of consumers with high purchase power and media brands are signing longer, and at times larger, deals than in previous years.

Thrillist found an opportunity to monetize a niche audience with a new LGBTQ+ travel channel, called We’re Out Here, that is sponsored with a long-term ad deal. Group Nine’s food, travel and lifestyle brand is among other publishers seeing an uptick in interest from advertisers with spends that extend beyond Pride Month.

The channel, which launches this week, will include written city guides and video content produced by a handful of full-time staffers and contributors who have personal experiences about the locations and businesses they are covering and/or are members of the LGBTQ+ community themselves. The vertical will live as a permanent vertical of Thrillist and will tap into the brand’s social distribution.

Orbitz, a travel company that has touted prioritizing the LGBTQ+ consumer base in its advertising strategy for the past 20 years, signed on as the launch partner for We’re Out Here in a mid-six-figure deal that extends through the end of the year, according to the company. Neither Thrillist nor Orbitz disclosed how much the deal is worth, but the agreement will include presented by branding and lower-funnel affiliate links with Orbtiz’s booking capabilities.

Pride Month 2020 was expected to be a big one for ad spends — it was the 50th anniversary of several Pride celebrations, including New York Pride. But just three months into the pandemic, ad budgets plummeted and campaign spend was down year over year.

Further into the pandemic — between the last half of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 — Group Nine surveyed more than 1,500 readers about their opinions on travel during and post-pandemic. That survey, which allowed respondents to self-identify if they were in the LGBTQ+ community, found that this demographic was five times more likely to take friendliness into account when planning a vacation in 2021 as well as 40% more likely to travel if they had the opportunity to learn something new. Group Nine conducts one or two large survey questionnaires each month using its Lab9 audience community network and has been asking the respondents to self-identify within the LGBTQ+ community for some time, according to the company.

“The community is focused on and has the same passions the other 11 months of the year, and so to market to them one month really doesn’t treat them as people that have all of those passions. And so we want to highlight that the commitment needs to be 12 months a year,” said Group Nine CRO Geoff Schiller.

In October, Group Nine relaunched its multicultural marketing and sales division as the MCC+ team, which focuses on campaigns reaching audiences in the Latinx, Black, LGBTQ+ and other marginalized communities, said Schiller. The company joined many …read more

Source:: Digiday