BL
Bhushan Lodha
10/28/20260 comments
Gemini
Q3 2021 Dae Lee Analyst, J.P. Morgan Hey, this is Dae Lee for Doug Anmuth. Thanks for taking the question. The first one, in the letter you talked about seeing significant improvement in your auction dynamic and advertisers being more active in markets where travel demand has recovered. Curious to hear if you could provide a little more detail on the overall advertiser participation. Are you seeing broad-based improvement in advertiser participation, meaning is the auction density recovering to pre-pandemic levels? Secondly, you talked about not benefiting as much from prior brand spend going forward. Just curious to hear, like how long do you guys anticipate it'll take you guys to recover to previous levels of brand efficiency as you think about increasing your investments in brand going into next year?
- Yeah. Then on your second question, on brand marketing. So through the pandemic, we got some valuable data points, like how much of the traffic is coming back direct after a long period with no brand advertising, and what is the impact of ramping up again. I would caution though that there's still a lot of noise in the numbers, and the next seasonal peak after the winter holidays will be very important to understand the long-term effect even better. When thinking about the right investment for next year, it is important to flag, as I did in my remarks, that we won't benefit in 2022 to the same extent, from past investments as we did in 2019, as we significantly reduced our spend, in the last two years. With a similar investment as in 2019, we would not be able to get to the same contribution number. How exactly we will balance our marketing investments next year then will depend on the additional learnings from our winter campaigns, the path of the recovery, and our expected long-term results. At this point, I can only say that we will remain cautious, as I said in Q1, given the high uncertainty. That means that we will stay flexible and do not commit to any budget. But if there's an opportunity to invest, we will go for it. We will continue to optimize for long-term value creation.
Gemini
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