Cfo Thought Leader

It was little more than 6 months after Matthias Tillmann first joined Trivago—and shortly after the travel booking company’s December 2016 IPO—when the company’s future CFO decided to step away from his senior IR role in order to head up Trivago’s creative production function. However, the jump to the creative side was not triggered by a sudden creative itch on Tillmann’s part. Instead, he was determined to extract new ROI insights from Trivago’s television advertising dollars, the very allocation that the online travel platform is credited with having converted into a groundbreaking strategic advantage. “I started to develop my own hypotheses but was unable to test them,” reports Tillmann, recalling his frustration when it came to extracting greater ROI from Trivago’s annual TV budget, which by 2019 had grown to more than $600 million, or roughly 70 percent of the company’s annual revenue. “In finance, you see numbers, but if you really understand the decision-making processes behind them, this changes how