New Digital Age sat down with Jonathan Grail, VP Performance Marketing at loveholidays, to discuss transitioning from traditional retail apparel to travel tech, why AI is about building systems rather than using tools, and why the ultimate competitive advantage in marketing comes down to human space for critical thinking.
You spent your career in apparel and retail at brands like House of Fraser, Gap, and Sweaty Betty. Why the move to travel?
loveholidays is the best business I have ever worked for. The best businesses know what they are and what they are not.
They understand the systemic problems they face and get after them without fear of challenging established norms. Many organisations have been talking about AI for years, but Loveholidays is actually executing it. Systems I dreamed about building years ago are already functioning here.
At a management offsite, our CEO Donnat outlined two non-negotiables: we must remain profitable, and we must operate as a platform business.
That sets the cogs whirring for someone in my role. AI is not about doing individual tasks faster; it is about building a system that reliably delivers better, more efficient outcomes at scale.
AI tools are automating execution. How does that change the role of the performance marketer?
Google spent years talking about YouTube as the primary driver to make search perform better. Now, with improved measurement and visibility across consumer behaviour, discovery and influence are becoming as critical as search itself.
The trade-off is data. Discovery within ecosystems like Google is becoming hyper-personalised, and platforms want deeper access to proprietary data to power those engines. The existential challenge for performance marketers is deciding how much valuable first-party data to share when you cannot fully predict how it will be deployed.
Search is not dead, but the interface has changed.
Queries have shifted from three words typed into a search bar to eight-word prompts, voice notes, and image searches. The winners will not be those who try to control the old channels, but those who build smart systems around signal reading, context, and profitable demand creation.
Loveholidays reported a massive increase in visits originating from LLMs. How does that shift impact measurement and attribution models?
Performance marketing has historically been very binary: good or bad, on target or off target. The emergence of AI-driven surfaces introduces shades of grey and a crucial dimension of time. A decision that yields ROI today might not be the right move for tomorrow, and vice versa.
We are moving away from the trap of false precision.
We have built strong multi-touch attribution models over the years, but no single model is right all the time. We are layering on alternative methodologies to provide complementary views. It is not about declaring one model correct and another wrong; it is about understanding why they differ.
The winners over the next few years will not be the businesses with the cleanest attribution software. They will be the businesses that can accumulate knowledge the fastest and leverage that knowledge to make better decisions.
Moving beyond traditional ROI or ROAS, what metrics are becoming essential for your team?
Commercial outcomes like gross profit margin and baseline ROI remain non-negotiable. However, beneath that top line, we focus heavily on two key concepts: marginal ROI and the elasticity of time.
Marginal ROI asks: if we spend an extra pound today, what is the incremental return, and if we pull back a pound, what is the exact cost?
The elasticity of time is equally critical.
For instance, looking ahead to major trading windows like Black Friday, over half of the consumers who eventually book with us start their research weeks in advance. If you evaluate performance strictly on immediate cost-per-click or same-day ROAS, you miss that entire demand-creation curve.
Managing that gap alongside short-term financial targets is where true growth lies.
Where does creativity fit into an increasingly-automated, data-driven environment?
Creative is the new bidding.
Scaling creative volume is a proven lever to cut through, but doing more creative is only half the equation. The real opportunity lies in using creative as a feedback loop and a business intelligence tool.
Testing diverse creative assets across different markets provides raw data on consumer psychology. What resonates with a UK audience regarding value and choice might differ fundamentally from what works in Germany. Creative testing allows us to introduce new variants into the system, see what survives, and feed those insights back into core strategy.
Looking ahead over the next 12 to 18 months, what is the biggest change in performance marketing that people are not talking about?
The mindset and evolution of the teams operating these systems. Everyone discusses AI as a tactical tool, but its real impact is lowering the technical barrier to execution.
We need people who act like entrepreneurs and problem solvers, not just operators running daily workflows. The paradox of AI acceleration is that as the machinery speeds up, the most valuable human skill becomes slowing down to think, reflect, and evaluate context.
Freeing up operational time through automation only matters if you reinvest that time into high-level critical thinking and creative strategy.
