Victor Hernandez

Victor Hernandez leads Online Display & Video Advertising for mobile app and web at eDreams ODIGEO, one of the world’s largest online travel platforms. With a career that spans food delivery, shopping, mobility, and now travel, Victor brings a well-rounded perspective to performance marketing. He’s spent over a decade helping top brands grow through smart user acquisition, thoughtful creative strategy, and a deep understanding of attribution and measurement.

The last time we spoke, you were a Senior Performance Display Specialist at Just Eat Takeaway. Your career has developed a lot since then. Can you describe your journey? What stands out?

My journey has taken me through several industries, each with its own pace, complexity, and learning curve. In food delivery, I focused on rapid customer acquisition and hyper-local optimization. From there, I moved into mobility and ride-sharing across EMEA, where I had to understand diverse markets, navigate regional regulations, and manage the unique challenges of serving both riders and drivers.

Eventually, I transitioned into travel, a space that introduced longer customer journeys, higher-value transactions, and seasonality. Each step required a fresh perspective and a willingness to adapt quickly.

What stands out most is how rapidly user behavior shifts across industries. That speed of change demands that marketing teams stay flexible, act fast, and constantly refine their strategies to remain effective.

Are there career lessons you can share with us? Do you have any advice for career growth and longevity in mobile and performance marketing?

One lesson that’s stayed with me over the years is that there’s almost always a way forward. If you dig deep enough into any challenge and question your initial assumptions, you’ll usually find a way through.

It also comes down to seeing both the forest and the trees. Getting caught up in the big picture or lost in the details is easy, but real progress often happens when you can shift between the two. That perspective shift usually leads to better decisions and new ideas. 

Can you describe what someone in your role does?

Performance marketing plays a strategic role in driving sustainable growth for the business. At its core, the goal is to make sure every marketing dollar is spent as efficiently as possible to maximize impact. 

I’d break my role down into four key pillars:

1. Strategic Budget Allocation: I manage how we distribute marketing spend across channels like paid search, social, display, and video. This is based on a mix of historical performance, current market trends, and evolving business goals.
2. Continuous Optimization: I’m constantly monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) and conversion funnels to find opportunities for improvement. That includes testing, tweaking, and refining campaigns to lower costs and improve return on investment (ROI).
3. Data-Driven Decision Making: A big part of my role is making sense of performance data. I dig into vast amounts of data to understand user behavior, pinpoint new growth opportunities, and turn those insights into clear recommendations for the team.
4. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Performance marketing doesn’t operate in a silo. I work closely with creative, product, analytics, and sales teams to align on goals and make sure we’re moving in the same direction with shared strategy and execution.

Travel companies operate in a competitive space. What marketing strategies or campaigns have you seen for travel platforms and companies that you’ve been impressed by? 

The travel industry is constantly evolving, and competition is high. To stay relevant, brands must continuously refine and adapt their marketing strategies.

While many major players follow similar approaches, two strategies have impressed me:

• User-Generated Content (UGC): Platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com greatly encourage travelers to share their experiences using branded hashtags like #BeautifulDestinations and #LiveThere. UGC adds authenticity and builds trust. It’s far more compelling when potential travelers see real stories and visuals from people like them.
• AI-Driven Recommendations: Lufthansa ran a campaign using IBM Watson to power personalized destination suggestions based on user questions. It made the discovery process more interactive and relevant, adding value before the booking stage even begins. It’s a great example of using technology to make the travel experience feel more tailored and intuitive.

What, in your opinion, sets mobile apart from other channels? How does it fit into a multi- or omnichannel strategy?

Mobile has become the dominant channel in users’ daily lives, with average screen time surpassing TV as far back as 2012—and it’s only continued to grow since. For many digital industries, mobile is now the core driver of acquisition and retention within a multi-channel strategy.

What sets mobile apart is how personal and immediate it is. Users carry their devices everywhere, which allows marketers to connect with them in real time, in context, and at multiple points throughout the day. We’ve also seen a clear shift in behavior, with many users moving from desktop-first interactions to mobile-only.

While mobile was once underutilized in broader marketing strategies, it’s now a centerpiece. As mobile continues to shape user behavior, it’s no longer just one channel among many. It’s often the foundation of a truly effective omnichannel experience.

Can you describe your approach to ad creative (production, testing, optimization, etc.)? 

My approach to ad creative is data-driven and iterative, focusing on continuous improvement. It starts with understanding the audience, platform nuances, and campaign objectives. That foundation helps shape relevant and performance-oriented creative concepts.

When testing, having the right setup and strategy is essential. I rely on a structured testing roadmap, often built around clear hypotheses, which becomes especially valuable as campaign volume increases.

From there, it’s about real-time optimization. I closely monitor performance metrics to spot what’s working and what isn’t, and quickly adjust creative elements or develop new iterations to improve efficiency and overall impact.

What marketing challenges or concerns keep you up at night?

Like many marketers today, I’m focused on navigating privacy changes and improving causal inference testing. Both are critical to making the right decisions and ensuring our strategies truly add value to the business. The challenge is striking the balance between respecting user privacy and still being able to measure impact accurately and act on reliable insights.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the transformative potential of Gen AI in everything from sales to ad creative. What are the biggest benefits you’ve seen from Gen AI? What do you think is under- or over-hyped?

I believe our day-to-day work is on the verge of major transformation. The real challenge is determining where and how to apply Gen AI to deliver the most value and efficiency.

I’m confident AI will help us work more efficiently and introduce new ways to approach complex problems. It’s exciting to be part of this shift, even as we continue learning about how to integrate it meaningfully into our workflows.

What are your predictions for the medium or long-term future of the performance marketing industry? (Feel free to share a best-case, worst-case, or medium-case scenario.)  

In the medium term, I see performance marketing becoming increasingly grounded in statistical modeling and experimentation. Learnings will be applied faster, and patterns or relationships within the data will become easier to identify and act on. As tools and methodologies evolve, marketers will rely less on assumptions and more on rigorous, data-informed decision-making.

What resources—websites, blogs, podcasts—do you use to keep up with performance marketing? 

LinkedIn is my go-to resource for staying current with trends and conversations in performance marketing. While it’s not specific to performance marketing, I also listen to the Y Combinator podcast, which I find valuable for learning about growth, management, and broader business topics that often tie back to marketing.