How Tripadvisor and PMG are breaking down the brand-agency divide with an ‘in-residence model’

Despite affordability concerns, research from Deloitte shows nearly half of Americans plan to take a vacation in 2026. A separate study from the Mastercard Economics Institute found these modern travelers are looking for immersion in local culture, as well as for experiences like events, nightlife and retail.

For travel brands, reaching these consumers at the right moment, and convincing them to book, isn’t just a creative challenge. It also depends on collaboration among brands, agencies and platforms.

Kristin Tormey, global head of paid and owned media at Tripadvisor and its experience-booking platform, Viator, and Carly Carson, head of integrated media at digital marketing agency PMG, recently sat down to discuss what a successful partnership in this space looks like, including PMG’s approach to an “in-residence model.”

Carly Carson: You started in social and content and are a master at brand engagement. I would love to hear how those experiences shaped where you are now and what you’re doing.

Kristin Tormey: I’ve been at Tripadvisor and Viator for about a year and a half. Prior to that, I was at Wendy’s, started in social. I think there’s something to be said about being that close to the consumer and seeing that ultimate feedback every single day. It really allows you to take a step out of the boardroom and understand what your consumer actually thinks about your brand. 

At Tripadvisor, we’re really focused on performance. How do we make sure we’re showing up where our consumer is with travel experiences that are relevant to them so when they are planning their trip, they can book one of our 400,000 experiences? It’s been interesting to start my career in such a brand-heavy space and then move into this performance space because the biggest thing that I’ve been able to see across the board is really how do we take both and marry them as we keep moving things forward.

Carson: I have similar roots, and I’ve always found social fascinating as the baseline for everything because your consumers are telling you exactly what they want and exactly what they need and what they like; and I think that has shaped how we approach marketing overall. Listen to your people and really build from there. 

So many marketers start in a single discipline. We both were social heavy — how has that shifted over the course of your career? How do you master cross-functional roles? 

Tormey: I think a lot of marketers follow that same road map of you might be a subject matter expert in one space, and, man, there’s a lot of value to that. But once you start to get a little bit more latitude, there’s a shift into “I might not be the subject matter in CRM or in gaming or social, but I know someone on my team who’s really strong at that. How do I keep pushing that team forward and mobilizing them to be able to get to the market in the right space?” As you level up, you really have to have trust in the people. I think anywhere I’ve worked within my career, the people make the business. And I truly believe that if you’ve got a good set of team members who are hungry and wanting to get after it and understand what we’re up against as a brand and really continue to tune into that consumer to pull that thread of “What do we hear in social?” or “What do we hear across the board from our consumers?” I think that’s really the special sauce to being able to have different experiences throughout your career across a multitude of remits.

Carson: What makes the best agency and client and/or platform relationship?

Tormey: Something that’s been around for the longest time is this belief of agency versus brand, and there isn’t necessarily that key integration that really allows you to see yourself as one team. We have such a strong relationship with PMG where it doesn’t feel like we’re on an agency call or we’re on a brand call. We’re on a team call; we’re identifying the problems, solving them together, moving things forward. 

We’ve had some augmented staffing roles. PMG gets to understand how does product affect the work that we do, what are we trying to achieve as a business year over year … and I think really not being afraid to open the door to your agency team — whether it’s through something like an augmented staffing role or just meetings with cross-functional team members — to say, “Here’s what our business is up against.” We’re all people trying to figure out what we’re doing every day for eight-plus hours a day and how would your agency be able to help you solve these problems if they don’t know that they exist?

Carson: We believe in an in-residence model. We want to have badges to your buildings. We want to sit next to you. We want to solve the problem immediately. There’s so much to be gained, especially in those cross-functional relationships, making sure we understand the financial components of the business. What do you all care about? How can we not just solve a media problem, but solve a total marketing problem? 

I’m curious how that extends to platform and media partners.

Tormey: We work with PMG from a media perspective. We also work with We Are Social on our social strategy and Influencer on our creator strategy. Our team is remote, so we typically meet with our media partners in New York. That’s where we go to make sure we’re chatting through the next quarter and the quarter behind us. There’s power in numbers, and I truly believe that we cannot do it all by ourselves. A brand can’t, single lead cannot, but bringing everyone to the table across our media partners and making sure that they have their own connections with us, it makes a huge difference, and sometimes it’s just as simple as that. It feels like it must be more complicated to get everyone on the same page. But you have to be in the same book at the same library on the same fricking page in order to do that. 

Carson: How do you balance the need to drive performance, but also continue to build the two brands.

Tormey: It’s important to make sure that you’re still hitting those lower-funnel metrics that get you those short-term gains, but then you’re building the brand alongside it. At the end of the day, we work in marketing and we’re sending people on vacation, so this should be fun. It becomes very easy to say, “So how many experiences were booked per day? What is my iROAS every single day?” And that’s definitely the tentpole of what holds us up. But we’ve done a lot of work with our media and platform partners to say, “What other lift studies can we do? What creator partnerships can we pull in? How can we make sure we’re ready to go back to those social roots that we both have? What is the consumer saying about us?” If inside our four walls we’re saying experiences booked per day, let’s go run the play, but if the consumer doesn’t even know you can book an experience on Tripadvisor or Viator, we have a big problem.

Carson: Something we’ve done together is really creating that testing flywheel. How do you build that muscle and how do you know when you’re getting actual insights versus just testing to test?

Tormey: It’s really bringing everyone to the table, making sure that your media partners, your agencies are all on the same page with what we’re up against, what we need to solve for our traveler, how to make the traveler planning and booking journey a little more frictionless and the testing framework. 

We make sure that our analytics team, our engineering team, our creative team have direct pipelines and their own connections across our media relationship and also with our partners out in the marketplace. I think it really is a culmination of all the things we’ve talked about thus far coming together to allow us to be nimble, move quickly, getting everyone internally on board to say this is important to our business, and if we don’t do it, it won’t be great.

Carson: You talk about having the need to have all of those pipes in place between analytics and the platform data and your source-of-truth data. Talk to me about that process and how important that foundation is.

Tormey: We spent the first quarter kicking off with our PMG team, with all of our agencies and every media partner within our marketing mix to say, “Alright, this is what the plan is. This is what the goal is for the next quarter. Here is our crawl, walk, run approach. Every phase, we need you alongside us as we bring in new partners to put them into our media mix and continue to reach new audiences. How do we make sure that everyone remains on that same page and isn’t going in 50 different directions trying to achieve what they want to achieve for their section of the business?”

I think it’s been key to have everyone constantly every month saying, “Did we hit this goal? What does it look like? What do we need to do to hit the next one?” And that doesn’t just sit inside of Tripadvisor and Viator. It is extended across everyone.

Carson: How have you stayed excited about marketing all of these years?

Tormey: I would be terrible at a job where I would do the exact same thing every single day. The constant challenge to try to get ahead of the curve, to try to make sure that you really remain rooted in who your brand is and bring that to the table for the consumer again in a way that’s additive and adds value — that’s a challenge every single day. And bringing your team along with you and trying to make sure that they’re still passionate about it and they’re seeing value in it. It’s a constant challenge, but a really rewarding one. That when you do get those wins, man, they’re that much more special because we’ve all done it together. 

Carson: If somebody was joining your team tomorrow, what trait would you look for? 

Tormey: When we first started working with our agency We are Social, we came in and said, “Alright, let’s sit down without all the numbers and the measurement because we could do that all day. What is everyone in the room interested in? What do you do when you leave work? Are you into art? Do you watch Bravo all the time? What are the things that you really love?” And we had a team member who was really into Demi Lovato and started running that play. Showed up as a brand in the comments in a really authentic way because it is authentic to that human being that’s on our team. I think sometimes because we have all this constant input of information and, “Oh, my gosh, we have to get ahead of agentic, AI, all the things,” there’s something still really important about the core of human beings and how you go to market with it too.

Carson: One of the things we’re always looking for is people with that innate curiosity, not just about your audiences and your consumers, but the people you’re working with and your partners, because that curiosity is what is going to make everybody wonder how can we do this just a little bit better, or get a little bit smarter, or have a little bit more fun in the process.