It is voting season once again for the Freddie Awards and that means you’ll be seeing emails from various airline and hotel loyalty programs, asking for your vote. In a twist which is new (at least to me) this year, the “get out the vote” effort has spilled over into paid online advertising efforts, at least for a couple programs. My Twitter stream in the past couple weeks has seen a few examples of this, with promoted tweets from various programs joining the feed.
And it has me wondering: Just how expensive are promoted tweets and is this really a good use of advertising budgets? If I had to guess the answer to the first question is low enough that the second one doesn’t really matter.
Then again, I’ve never quite understood the campaigning efforts the Freddies draw from the programs, so perhaps I was never going to understand this anyways.
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How many average flyers know or care what a Freddie is? It’s always seemed to me to be the favorites of a subset of flyers and not representative of people buying tickets in general. In particular those who like accumulating miles and flying on award fares. Not every airline asks there customers to vote for them. Thus is the first time I am aware of paid advertising. Who really cares. Members of the BOD? Shareholders? The Freddie Awards? How much increase in ticket fare revenue does winning a Freddie drive for its winner?