With an extra bank holiday on the calendar and predictions for the hottest summer in 50 years, the desire to travel and make up for the past two years is set to increase. As a result, British travellers expect to spend more money on their next holiday, and people are ready to plan and enjoy the summer holidays just around the corner.

With Blis Audience Explorer you can understand the new types of travellers in the UK, what drives them and what you can expect from them based on real-world behaviour. These insights can guide your entire media strategy: from creative concepts to finding and reaching the right audiences. 

Here are a few lessons from the latest Easter bank holiday and what we can all expect for the next long weekend in June and the summer ahead of us. 

Go big or staycation?
Whilst staycations remain popular; we’re seeing a growing number of travellers choosing to splash out on their next big holiday. Almost half (45%) of travellers expect to spend more money on their next holiday, compared to only 29% in 2020. Younger groups are leading this trend as they seek more adventurous holidays in new locations. 

The big opportunity for brands: as consumers are more willing to pay more to make up for the lost time, bring them into your journey during their travel planning and booking stages.

Domestic rediscovery: how are brands keeping travellers local?
With some consumers setting their sights on going abroad, how are brands enticing travellers to explore the UK? Lumo’s new flight shame advert is an excellent example of brands tapping into consumers’ concern for eco-friendly travelling. They emphasise train travel as a green alternative to flying. Other brands have been appealing to the adventurous nature of travellers by showing different sides to familiar UK locations that they have yet to explore. 

The big opportunity for brands: with UK consumers travelling further than before within the UK, now is a great time to encourage travel to new exciting destinations. Tap into their daily activities to start showing them good opportunities to have fun while staying local. 

The search for sun
We saw an increase in consumers travelling to seaside locations during the last bank holiday as we got that rare April sunshine. In fact, we saw a significant increase in travel to the beach compared to the previous sunny period in March – suggesting that when consumers have more time to plan, they are willing to travel further. This behaviour was reflected in the short-haul journeys we saw, where people were willing to travel further afield when they had the opportunity for a longer holiday.

The big opportunity for brands: with the summer and the Platinum Jubilee bank holiday approaching, brands can capitalise on this trend by showing potential travellers the options and destinations (whether in the UK or abroad) to travel further and catch the sun.

So, get ready cause here comes the sun (and I say, it’s all right).

Marketers and planners spend significant time trying to understand the patterns and thoughts that influence consumer behaviour. The pandemic, privacy challenges and the rise of online shopping have created a jigsaw that is hard to solve. What will define the path to purchase at a time when more parts of the customer journey are digital? Understanding browsing behaviour can only reveal so much. While what we browse can reveal something about consumers’ interests, nothing can reveal real interests – and importantly intent – better than real-life actions. 

After all, it’s only human to say one thing and do another…

Interest ≠ real purchase intent

Simply being interested in a topic isn’t necessarily the best indication of purchase intent. For example, reading about healthy diets and exercise doesn’t necessarily mean that that person is ready to engage with brands in those sectors or is an exercise fanatic or healthy eater. However, real-world location – combined with other signals  – can be a powerful source of insights to reveal relevant audiences. Now, imagine enriching that seed audience with other powerful lifestyle (and other) data to get a very granular picture of your relevant audiences. We want to make it as quick and easy as possible to find and activate these relevant audiences.

That’s why we’re launching Blis behavioural lifestyle audiences – a suite of plug and play audiences, such as affluent spenders, discount shoppers and culture lovers. With our new ‘grab and go’ behavioural lifestyles, media planners can quickly and easily find audience profiles based on directly-observed human behaviours, revealing a powerful pool of potential buyers and helping brands target even more relevant audiences. Media planners can also use these pre-defined behavioural lifestyles as a starting point to layer on other data to get even more granular audiences.

Visit our Audience Explorer hub to check out our 1-pager and understand how we build our audiences from real-world location behaviours, making them more accurate, granular and relevant to any brief. You can find them quickly on Audience Explorer, ready to use or enrich them with other contextual lifestyle signals. Save them right in our platform, ready for activation by Blis’ Managed Service team or your own traders.

We are proud to announce that Blis UK has been listed in the Campaign Best Places to Work for the second year in a row. The award celebrates employers who have proved they know what it takes to create environments where people love to work.

Companies taking part were reviewed via a two-stage assessment by independent research company Work Research Group. For the first phase, businesses provided information about their benefits, policies and practices through a questionnaire. Then, our UK-based employees filled out a confidential survey, used to evaluate the workplace experience and culture, as well as employees’ understanding of their role and relationship with their manager. 

What makes Blis a great place to work

• Diversity & inclusion
  Since 2019, in light of the challenges imposed by the pandemic, we have introduced a number of new initiatives to help employees feel happier and supported by the business, and to promote diversity and inclusion across the company. In 2020, we created Rise to support and celebrate diversity and inclusion at Blis and the industry as a whole.

  Through Rise, we are constantly educating our staff in company meetings and specialised training. We created a women-only monthly event called ‘Let’s talk about…” to discuss different issues and challenges we all face as women in tech. We also partner with other respected voices in tech by hosting panel discussions about different diversity topics – from black empowerment to challenges faced by women in the workplace.

  At Blis, we are committed to D&I training for all staff and have successfully rolled out our Diversity Charter –  a set of values and behaviours that each of us, as Blis employees, strive to take on board and embed into our everyday lives. 

• New benefits 
  We have also improved our parental leave policy, including support to ease return to work for new parents and extended paid leave for them. Additionally, we reviewed our policy to offer extended paid bereavement leave for pregnancy loss.
  
  We also recently added a new benefit package for women during menopause to provide a better quality of life during a challenging period. 

• Mental health & wellbeing 
  Mental health and well being are fundamental pillars supporting diversity at Blis. We encourage our team to come forward when they are facing difficult situations by supplying them with a set of benefits that helps with their wellbeing. In 2021 we introduced fully paid mental health days off and trained 20% of the organisation as mental health first aiders across all countries and offices, we provide life & career coaching and have recently introduced  24/7 wellbeing therapy for all employees. 

You can read more about Campain Best Places to Work and see the full list here.

Congratulations to our fantastic Blis team!

To wrap up our special #BreakTheBias series, we heard from our Regional VP, Melissa Dickman. Keep reading to find out her thoughts about how we can all help break the bias.

1. What were the one or two most important bias-breaking career moves you’ve made to date and why? 
   When I was pregnant with my second child, I led a global company expansion into the US market. I recall a conversation where I was told that it was too big of an undertaking and a risk while pregnant. When I celebrated my son’s 5th birthday and was still at this company, I reflected on that conversation and the rewards and challenges that came with this experience. It was a risky undertaking, personally and professionally. I learned to work smarter, not just harder.

   As a result, my team and revenue grew exponentially. Many of the young women who worked with me during this time have now started families of their own. They went back to work after their maternity leave and have stayed in the workforce. Some have shared that watching me had inspired them and kept them motivated to continue working after their children were born.

2. What is the most important challenge we still need to tackle for women in tech?
   Women are still overlooked for senior positions within AdTech and other industries. We have to teach young women who are starting or growing in their careers that they can accomplish stretch goals and break through the ceiling. They might have to work a little harder and prepare a bit longer, but persistence and perseverance will ultimately pay off. 

3. What does #BreakTheBias mean to you?
   It means that we have an opportunity to change the narrative for our daughters and young women at different ages and stages in their careers. It means that we can break down the diversity barriers and acknowledge unconscious bias in how we work and live. It means expecting more from our leaders and holding others accountable. We need to raise the bar and have a higher set of standards. Finally, it means helping our colleagues and peers become aware when their unconscious biases have shown up.
   
   
4. What people can do to help #BreaktheBias or be a better ally?
   #BreakTheBias for me means lifting other women up or culturally diverse people; giving voice to diverse opinions because we’ve created a safe space for individuality. Suppose we acknowledge that everyone has come from different circumstances, which shapes how they face the world every day. In that case, we will have an opportunity to support one another and create gender and racial equality at home and within organizations by breaking down the barrier