The great mystery of marketing was summed up by department store mogul John Wanamaker over a century ago when he said: “I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half.”
For the tourism and visitor industry, Zartico CEO Sarah Lehman says her company has finally cracked the code on that riddle of wasted advertising-dollars.
“We illuminate the hidden patterns of people and places to help our customers identify the right visitor for the right time,” says Lehman.
Zartico, a privately held and venture capital backed company, makes the hidden become visible. This software-as-a-service (SaaS) company uses data intelligence, analytics and visualizations to help destination tourism organizations such as Santa Ana, California, the San Francisco Peninsula, Travel Alaska, and Boston make data-driven strategic decisions.
“After seeing the benefits of making data-driven decisions, we will never go back to the data stone age,” said Zartico client Wit Tuttell, director of Visit North Carolina.
While the online retail world has always made marketing decisions with trackable data, the challenge still exists for businesses that operate in the physical, place-based world like travel.
Zartico’s data science also has implications for many place-based industries such as sports venues, airports and municipalities.
Founded in 2019, Zartico has solved the conundrum of the place-based economy by using artificial intelligence and other sophisticated modeling to help visitor destinations avoid wasting marketing budgets.
“The visitor economy contributes 10% to the global GDP, yet it is one of the last to embrace big data and analytics, relying instead on quarterly and yearly reports that are almost instantly outdated,” said Lehman.
CEO Sarah Lehman Personally, Lehman is no stranger to travel. The Harvard Business School MBA splits her time between Salt Lake City, Utah, where Zartico is headquartered, and Southern California, where her son attends high school.
Like a great detective story, Lehman says embedded within movement and spending patterns are the clues to empower marketers to identify and engage their ideal customers at the optimal time.
Better than the solution to a whodunit, this is the answer to the riddle of who wants to do it, where they want to do it and what they want to do it with.
“We’re in an ever-changing landscape, and for us to have results in more real time, as opposed to a couple months after, I think it’s going to make us a lot smarter in decision making,” said Stuart Maas, senior director of marketing & business development from Visit Lake Tahoe, a Zartico client.
Investors took note of Zartico’s progress. According to Ryan Kruezinga, general partner at Arthur Ventures that invested $20 million in Zartico in 2022, destinations represent an $18 billion market.
Zartico’s financing windfall was used to grow its engineering and product teams, expand its machine learning, AI and predictive capabilities, acquire new proprietary data sets and expand into new industries.
Since the investment, Zartico has expanded from 180 to 260 tourism industry clients, an almost 50% increase. Some of the California clients include Newport Beach, Dana Point, Mammoth, Laguna, Modesto, Temecula, Vacaville, and Palm Desert.
“Growth is a key metric for us” says Lehman. “We’ve been working two years to bring this technology to market, and we’re ready. We’re ready to grow again and accelerate into our existing space and beyond.”
A second key metric is the number of innovations Zartico is able to bring to the market.
“We keep reminding our clients, we’re not going to let the grass grow underneath our feet,” says Lehman. “We’re going to keep pushing. We’re going to keep moving.”
A critical factor for Zartico to grow is to fully understand the challenges facing the visitor economy.
“Three challenges that remain constant year-over-year are increasing competition among destinations, decreasing budgets across the board, and external factors like a political environment that’s really unstable and natural disasters,” says Lehman.
Because of the intense economic pressures pushing organizations to justify every dollar, Lehman has seen that intensity increase as leaders have to constantly prove their efforts. This is one of the reasons behind Zartico’s new product called Digital Campaign Optimization.
“The reason why we call it Digital Campaign Optimization is that we give the opportunity to optimize their campaigns during flight, versus waiting till the end and getting just a report that says your return on investment was X, Y, and Z,” says Lehman. “That allows our customers to identify their target markets and build profiles around them based on specific goals of the community.”
As an example, she says if a community has a goal of promoting its culinary scene this product can find those potential customers who like to explore culinary communities and optimize digital campaigns.
To decipher that information, Zartico uses their proprietary integrated data model which is built on anonymized geolocation, spend and lodging data to provide a closed loop attribution model for the physical economy.
Simply put, a better understanding of the customers who come, how much they spend and where they choose to stay.
“The technology includes profile building, market opportunities, lodging performance, website attribution, benchmarks, and comparative analysis,” explains Lehman. “Our tools help evaluate advertising performance to acquire high-value customers and enable users to act on the information quickly and efficiently by reducing waste and maximizing ROI.”
To maximize ROI, Lehman notes that most destinations do have some seasonality that must be taken into account.
Ultimately, the destination’s goal is to have level tourism demands that translate to effective yield management. Too much demand and too little supply is not good for anyone.
“Our tools help our clients understand opportunity timeframes and opportunity markets and then profile that to help level load their tourism industry and provide year-round jobs,” adds Lehman about Zartico’s technology.
Forty years ago, the late author and futurist John Naisbitt predicted a high-tech/high-touch world. Naisbitt foretold that the more technology-driven and data-driven organizations become, the more their success would depend on how they touched the lives of the people involved.
One huge benefit of Zartico data science is how it helps the tourism and visitor industry foster personal relationships with its clientele.
“It is a relationship if you decide to go to Disneyland tomorrow,” says Lehman. “I mean, that’s a really personal relationship. Our clients look through the lens of relationship far more than someone selling a phone or a new toaster oven. They’re representing an entire community when they do their marketing.”
Henry DeVries is the author of 20 business books and is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Indie Books International in Oceanside, California.
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