What Traveler Media Can Do That Retail Media Can't with Kinective Media by United Airlines | Behind the Numbers

Kinective Media by United Airlines is the airline industry’s first traveler media network, using insights from travel behaviors to connect customers to personalized, real-time advertising, content, experiences and offers from leading brands. Kinective Media’s platform allows marketers to reach travelers across a wide range of channels including United's award-winning mobile app and inflight entertainment screens. Kinective Media enhances the travel experience for millions of United customers and drives greater loyalty among United MileagePlus® members through customized offers and experiences. For more information, visit: https://kinectivemedia.com to get started today.

Marcus Johnson (00:00):

Kinective Media by United Airlines is redefining traveler media with a world-first omnichannel network. From in-flight to online and in-app, experience best-in-class tech, helping brands engage travelers where it matters most. Ready to make an impact? Discover more at kinectivemedia.com, that's Kinective with a K.

(00:28):

Hey gang, it's Friday, April 25th. Sarah, Richard, our listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, the eMarketer video podcast made possible by Kinective Media by United Airlines. I'm Marcus, and joining me for today's episode, we have two people. We start with our principal analyst covering everything retail and commerce media, based in New York, it's Sarah Marzano.

Sarah Marzano (00:48):

Hey, Marcus. Thanks for having me.

Marcus Johnson (00:49):

Of course. And we also have the CEO of Mileage Plus, living in Chicago and that's Richard Nunn.

Richard Nunn (00:57):

Hi, how are you?

Marcus Johnson (00:58):

Hey, fella. Very good. Thanks for asking. Sarah, take note. She's never asked how I am.

Sarah Marzano (01:05):

I haven't. I never do.

Marcus Johnson (01:06):

That's why you're on once a year.

(01:08):

We start with the speed intro-

Richard Nunn (01:10):

It's a British thing, Marcus. It's a British thing.

Marcus Johnson (01:11):

Exactly. Manners-

Sarah Marzano (01:12):

I'm a New Yorker.

Marcus Johnson (01:13):

...is what he's referring to.

Sarah Marzano (01:15):

I assume you're fine. You're here.

Marcus Johnson (01:16):

Yeah, that's true. My dad's from New York. He's equally as terrible. We start with the speed intro to get to know our guests a little better. Mainly Richard, because we know Sarah enough.

Sarah Marzano (01:30):

I feel like I need to redeem myself now though, so...

Marcus Johnson (01:32):

That's true.

Sarah Marzano (01:32):

I'm going to be super nice.

Marcus Johnson (01:35):

All right. 60 seconds-ish on the clock. Richard, let's do it. You are based in Chicago, but where are you from?

Richard Nunn (01:43):

I'm British, and very well-mannered.

Sarah Marzano (01:46):

Right, all right.

Marcus Johnson (01:47):

[inaudible 00:01:47]

Richard Nunn (01:48):

No, I'm living in Chicago, but also I have a place in Denver, so I sort fly between the two.

Marcus Johnson (01:53):

Very nice. Where are you from back home though?

Richard Nunn (01:56):

The South Coast, Hampshire, but I lived a lot in London.

Marcus Johnson (02:00):

Very nice, a great part. What do you do in a sentence?

Richard Nunn (02:04):

I literally have the privilege of being the CEO, as you mentioned, to lead a pretty awesome team to change the world. I don't come from the land of airlines and loyalty, but to change the world of what loyalty means through technology and obviously also to talk about media and what we're doing as a global first there.

Marcus Johnson (02:23):

Very nice. And finally, the best experience you've had whilst on vacation?

Richard Nunn (02:30):

Well, I like to be in the moment, and it was literally three or four weeks ago, I was in British Columbia in Canada with a company called Mike Vagle who do heli skiing. So every day for six days I was skiing in one and a half meters of fresh powder in the middle of nowhere. So it was wonderful.

Marcus Johnson (02:46):

Heli being they drop you into a...

Richard Nunn (02:49):

Top of a triangle and you ski down it.

Sarah Marzano (02:52):

And it's in really remote areas that you wouldn't be able to access?

Richard Nunn (02:56):

One and a half million acres of nothingness. There's eight skiers in one and a half million acres. Pretty cool.

Sarah Marzano (03:03):

Oh my gosh, that's-

Marcus Johnson (03:04):

That sounds horribly dangerous.

Sarah Marzano (03:06):

Yeah.

Richard Nunn (03:07):

Scary and exhilarating.

Marcus Johnson (03:09):

Amazing. Sarah, I don't even know why...

Sarah Marzano (03:12):

My answer is just going to be so ridiculous-

Marcus Johnson (03:14):

Yeah, [inaudible 00:03:15]-

Sarah Marzano (03:14):

...by comparison.

Marcus Johnson (03:16):

...let you go with it.

Sarah Marzano (03:18):

But I think it's a good one. So I love traveling and I have a bunch of examples that involve amazing life-changing food or sites that I get to visit, but I think that the crowd pleaser is going to be, if I dig really deep into my archives, when I was seven or eight, my parents took me on vacation to a resort in Mexico. And Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were on vacation at the same resort. I got to meet them and I got to hang out with them. Now I'm a child of the late eighties, early nineties, and so Mary-Kate Ashley Olsen have been really important figures in my life for a very, very long time. No? Do you hate it?

Marcus Johnson (03:18):

I think you made this up to top Richard's-

Sarah Marzano (03:18):

No!

Marcus Johnson (03:57):

...It feel was made up to top Richard's story.

Sarah Marzano (04:00):

It's not, we played Marco Polo in the pool. It was a transformative experience for me.

Marcus Johnson (04:06):

That's amazing.

Sarah Marzano (04:08):

Thank you.

Marcus Johnson (04:10):

All right, fair enough. Not bad.

Sarah Marzano (04:10):

I do not know how to ski.

Marcus Johnson (04:11):

Is it true? Who knows.

Sarah Marzano (04:11):

It's true.

Richard Nunn (04:13):

That's cool.

Marcus Johnson (04:15):

Very nice indeed. So they're our two guests for today. I'll let you decide whether their stories are factual, but it is time for the fact of the day.

(04:28):

So what are the most visited monuments, historical and cultural sites in the world? These numbers come from Statista as of 2018, seems to be the most recent time that they did this. But they're pre-pandemic, which is also probably paints more of a clearer picture than how travels changed today in terms of where people go. So for the longest time, do you guys want guess anything?

Sarah Marzano (04:53):

Eiffel Tower.

Richard Nunn (04:55):

I was going to go Eiffel Tower.

Marcus Johnson (04:56):

It is on this list. Well played, Eiffel Tower's seventh. The Colosseum is fourth on this list. They all pretty much have about 5 to 8 million visitors a year. This list excludes places of pilgrimage and religious gatherings. But yes, the Colosseum is fourth. The Eiffel Tower is seventh. Palace of Versailles, I'll leave number one for a second, Palace of Versailles is second. Lincoln Memorial third, then it's Colosseum, Taj Mahal, Parthenon, sorry. Eiffel Tower and then Peterhof Palace in St. Petersburg in Russia. But number one with twice as many visitors as the second place Palace of Versailles is Forbidden city in Beijing. So Forbidden City built [inaudible 00:05:48] early 1400s. It served as the Chinese Imperial Palace in the middle of Beijing for almost 500 years. It was the center of the Chinese government and emperors like the Ming Dynasty and others lived there. So that is the most visited by a long shot.

Richard Nunn (06:06):

Interesting.

Marcus Johnson (06:07):

Yeah.

Sarah Marzano (06:07):

I learned. Thanks Marcus.

Marcus Johnson (06:10):

Okay. Please don't be surprised that you learn something. Everyone is, I do this mainly for me. Anyway, today's real topic, the future of traveler media.

(06:26):

Right folks, everyone's well aware of commerce media's explosive growth in recent years. Travel media network ad spending is the segment of that that we break out. It's also having a high growth moment expanding by close to 20% this year, according to our wonderful forecasting team, and 17% next year to reach the 3 billion mark. So no small amount of change. Sarah, how does travel media, as we call it, fit into the larger commerce media space?

Sarah Marzano (07:02):

So I think for us at eMarketer, 2024 was really the year where non-retail industries launching commerce media networks went from being sort of a fringe occurrence to this full-fledged trend. And you alluded to our wonderful forecasting team. Those folks worked really quickly to not only publish a more holistic commerce media ad spending forecast, but also break out the most prominent industries within that. So of course we've been forecasting retail media ad spending for a long time, but we now also forecast what's happening in traveler media and what's happening in financial services as two of the more prominent non-retail verticals that have emerged.

(07:41):

And I think something I've been sort of pushing against, it gave me a very easy talking point that becomes sort of unnecessarily pervasive in our industry that is taking the emergence of non-retail commerce media networks and sort of pitting them against retail media. So making it a vertical versus vertical thing and talking about it as a competitive threat. And I think for me what's sort of been fascinating is I've done our research and analysis into the landscape is that each sort of cohort operating within commerce media can offer something that the other can't. So I think there's actually so much opportunity for complementary solutions for both advertisers and sort of vertical to vertical partnerships that's being unlocked as this industry continues to evolve.

Marcus Johnson (08:30):

It's similar to social media, we talk about them in the same pot, but really every time I speak to Jasmine Emberg, our principal on social, she's always like, they do different things.

Sarah Marzano (08:31):

Absolutely.

Marcus Johnson (08:40):

And they have different audiences and there's overlap because they're all social and they do some similar things. They kind of copycat each other to a certain extent, but people use them quite differently. So it sounds a similar parallel here. Richard, what can traveler media, specifically an airline like United, do that retail media?

Richard Nunn (09:04):

Yeah, well just to pick up what Sarah said, we define traveler as this sort pre, during and post. So it's not just in the moment, it is a pre during and post travel in totality. But I think, and I don't disagree, Sarah, in terms of your sort of vertical to vertical and one plus one equals three scenario. I think where as a global first in the airline space doing this, where we differentiate is, and we intentionally when we launched came out and didn't just focus on travel advertisers, we went intentionally in the non-endemic verticals from luxury to auto to finance, you name it, outside of travel. Because A, the size and scale of our audience is big. But that point about the moment of dwell time. So we can play both the brand game and the performance game, whereas retail I think is challenged. I mean this is a huge market and we've seen it scale massively, but it is very centered around performance attribution and CPG categories. So we were very intentional to go across vertical, which is really important.

(10:12):

But overall it's the size of the scale, and the different digital channels we have. If you think about that traveler journey, when people are thinking about trying to be inspired about where they want to go, you go on and search destinations around the world and we have 330 of them to go and visit. So .com app when you're in the lounge and you spend about an hour and a half in the airport even before you get on the flight. So there's a lot of time spent. And then our average, just average dwell time in plane is over three and a half hours. So that's a lot of time in front of the screen where you're strapped in and you don't get up and get your coffee.

Marcus Johnson (10:52):

That's close to I think average time people spend with a television.

Richard Nunn (10:57):

Yeah.

Marcus Johnson (10:57):

At home.

Sarah Marzano (10:58):

Yeah.

Richard Nunn (10:59):

Yeah, it's big. And then you come out the other side and then obviously we can sort of target people on smart TVs and IP enabled devices. So that's how we define it. So I think we play in a slightly broader space both in vertical and channels, which is pretty exciting.

Sarah Marzano (11:16):

I think for me, when I think about the opportunity for an airline like United that has this robust loyalty program and really knows its customers, we take something that can be a challenge in digital advertising like this really long stretched out, fragmented path to purchase and actually can flip it around into being this strength. You have so many moments to connect with your customers and you have this great understanding of what they might be looking for depending on what phase of their travel journey they're in. Are they in research and discovery? Are they in a really efficiency sort of mindset where they're doing a check-in or their boarding process? Are they in a longer dwell time or are they in that sort of post arrival while they're on vacation? And I can see that just being such a valuable offering for advertisers of all shapes and sizes to reach customers in those various mindsets.

Richard Nunn (12:10):

Yeah. And also the who, right? You've got business travelers. So Richard Nunn, I have a @United.com versus RichardNunn@Gmail.com. I'm not giving my full email out. But could be a family travel guy. I could be going away with my wife, I could be in the moment with my family and kids or I could be on a business travel. That mindset is also very different when you're with your family going away on a family vacation. And we see it, the people are prepared to spend lots of money shopping. Certainly in the airport, why airport shops do really, really well and when they get there, "I've forgotten my sunscreen, I've forgotten that. My apple adapter." all that sort of stuff. We've proven that with research that people are in the moment where they spend money, so they're open to being engaged, again, with the right advertiser at the right time.

(13:01):

But also on the flip side, as a business traveler to try and hit B2B audience is hard. It's one of the hardest audiences to hit. So we have certain data points around who those are. If you're sitting more front of a cabin, you're probably more likely to be a business traveler possibly. You may know where you work and what title you are because that could be on your mileage plus account. So there's lots of different data points. So we can play, it's an interesting place for a consumer and a B2B play, which is interesting.

Sarah Marzano (13:31):

It's such a valid point too though because I think whether I'm traveling for business or pleasure specifically in the airport, my budget does not exist anymore. If I can acquire something that's going to make me more comfortable or pass the time or help me out with something I've forgotten, it's happening. And it needs to happen.

Richard Nunn (13:47):

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Marcus Johnson (13:48):

You mentioned scale and it is really quite significant, over 40 million mileage plus folks. You mentioned the amount of time people are spending three and a half hours, which as I mentioned our forecasting team has numbers on how much time people spend with a television at home and it's around that. People who are older, it goes up, people younger, it goes down. It's a remarkable amount.

(14:08):

And then I was reading the CVS article from Kate Gibson who was noting that you have a hundred thousand seat back screens across your fleet as well, which is a lot. So you've got the scale. And then on top of that, as you mentioned, we talked a bit about the data, the cabin class, people's age, the city you live in, where you're traveling to. So there's a lot to this offering. Airline passengers, as we're kind of alluding to talking about, they're a very captive audience, but they can be an irritable bunch. What makes travelers more receptive, Richard, to personalized ads than folks in other settings perhaps?

Richard Nunn (14:44):

Yeah, the size and scale is big. And when we flew, we had the world's biggest airline. We flew 174 million people last year, various segments. So yeah, we certainly have the scale and the scale is non-members and members. We have in excess of 111 million unique IDs. So it's big. But I think this point that I mentioned earlier around the traveler journey and the points in that journey where people have time, some people on the plane, I'm probably the most productive on a plane. I work and hammer out emails to my anoints of my team.

(15:23):

They know I'm on a flight at whatever, 10 PM at night. Or you're just in the moment where you want to watch some great content and movies and completely switch off. And I know we'll probably talk about this, but obviously with the emergence of Starlink coming in, when I joined the business two years ago, it's kind of a fascinating mindset. So all the things you can do on earth today, which we do with a phone or on your laptop or on an iPad or whatever, you can enable your life 24/7 with a piece of technology in front of you. And then oddly, when you go into a plane, that stops to some degree. The wifi experience is not great and you need the connectivity. You may have access to [inaudible 00:16:03] great stuff, but if you don't have the connectivity, and I get really frustrated if the wifi is down or whatever, there's been a negative experience. That changes with Starlink. And so that enablement of awesome, very, very low latency, amazing connectivity is going to enable a whole bunch of stuff from, you could be watching a streaming service at home, you could be paused, you get back on the plane and you'll be able to pick up exactly where you were on that. You'll be able to do your shopping, your banking, live sports, you name it. It just opens up a real world of possibilities.

(16:41):

And because of that average dwell time when you're sitting there, you have access to everything. So you're not limited in terms of what you can do. And it's a great experience. And we know through our MPS, like if there's great content on the screen, the food tastes nicer, the flight crew have an amazing experience. Maybe the flight isn't as late as you think it was if that was an experience. So it is interesting. So I think the focus on those screens that we're investing in it, and it's a hundred thousand today, just over, but by 2030 will be nearer 300,000. So there's a huge investment that we're scaling [inaudible 00:17:17]-

Marcus Johnson (17:17):

It's the first thing people talk about when they get off of a... "How is your flight?" And they're like, "I've watched some good films."

Richard Nunn (17:21):

Yeah.

Sarah Marzano (17:21):

Yeah. Or they're like, "The wifi didn't work." I feel like there's not a single person listening to this right now or watching us, if you are, who's taken a flight who isn't relating deeply to that friction and frustration that can occur. Because it feels like a miracle when the wifi works. Richard, when you were talking about getting work done on a plane, I love it when I can make that happen, but the frustration of getting on a plane with a plan to catch up on emails or even a plan to work on a deck that might be saved to the cloud or whatever and not being able to do that is so real.

(17:57):

And I think there is such a powerful shift that will occur when you can... I think about I used to not be able to get wifi in the New York City subways and now I can and I cannot imagine not being able to do that, right? And so it's very exciting to think about this sort of unlock in terms of these consumers who are spending a lot of time, travelers who are spending a lot of time but weren't able to access this type of connection before.

Richard Nunn (18:25):

Yeah. You get very frustrated. It feels like a time wasted.

Sarah Marzano (18:30):

It really does.

Richard Nunn (18:31):

When you have that amazing time to sort of do whatever you want-

Sarah Marzano (18:34):

Because when do we have time to be just productive? To sit still and be productive or just ingest content too. Because sometimes before I take a flight, I'll sort of remember, "Oh, I need to download the last episode of White Lotus if I want to watch it on the plane." 'Cause I can't count on what's going to be available or what have you. So very exciting.

Richard Nunn (18:52):

Well, on that last point, I think that's going to be the interesting challenge which we've thought about very carefully is behavior change. So the world that we live in today, you do see it. I travel a lot obviously, and you see people who preloaded content on an iPad or their phone, and so ensuring that we've got awesome big screens on the seat backs and that will give you literally a foot away from your eyes. You want to give them that amazing experience. So we're going to have to go through the process of behavior change from what they've historically done to you can actually have all the things you want to have now on the screen in front of you rather than a live phone. So that's going to be an interesting behavior change.

Sarah Marzano (19:31):

And I think this is when we talk about enabling wifi and being able to do things like say, place your grocery order, which is that's really appealing to me. I'm coming home, I know my fridge is empty, I want to be able to place my grocery order, or I have a fund, I'm coming home from Congress, but I've got a vacation coming up. I want to buy new clothes.

(19:48):

That's an area where I really see there's a great opportunity for retail media and traveler media to sort of come together. And I'm curious, Richard, if you see a future world where maybe there are exclusive offers available to customers who are on a United flight and doing their shopping, I'm making this up. If I'm placing my grocery orders, they're going to be sort of an incentivization behind that.

Richard Nunn (20:16):

Yeah, and what we're doing now, and I was at an event last week where I think, and it was a retail commerce media event, and this point where our hyper focus actually isn't, yes, it's on the advertising partners in terms of innovation, but the innovations coming from this cohort of partnerships and all the things you can enable, which yes, may have a commercial benefit but also may have an awesome customer experience. So things like ride-shares, you can kind of pre-book that on the flight so that you know the flight's on time or whatever, you can just pre-book that. Your point about ordering your groceries, maybe you're renting a nice apartment or a house somewhere, get all that done and you're destressing your life. And there's some great customer experience. If a plane were to be late, we could auto-update the data to that ride-share to then move it by 30 minutes and maybe we know that it's a 22-minute walk and you adjust everything accordingly.

(21:14):

So I think there's a lot of things, we did some great testing with Live Nation last year when we launched around entertainment. We know where people are going and we just tested it on some flights into Las Vegas. They know exactly what seats are available to the second, and we just put the top 6 or 10 shows on that evening, what's available and you can book it there then.

(21:37):

So I think what this is going to enable to do is this ecosystem where, yes, we're at the center, but what else can we enable for a great customer experience? Shopping, dining, entertainment. You're more commoditized, you're grocery shopping and whatever because you have that time, as you said, to just think about things you need to plan, your chore list. Like you've got to check all that stuff off, and if you can do that in the sky because you have great connectivity, then it's going to be an awesome experience or exciting.

Sarah Marzano (22:06):

Yeah, that ride-sharing piece feels like such low-hanging fruit because another thing I'm sure everyone can relate to is that frantic feeling of getting off the flight. I am a carry-on bag person because I want to get to where I'm going as fast as possible. And frantically making sure there's a ride-share available as I get off the flight, if I could eliminate that, just like that's taken care of, huge!

Richard Nunn (22:28):

Yeah, and we're already doing this just from an operational perspective. We have this thing on our app called Connection Saver, so we know, again, if flights are moving or whatever, we can send a message to the other plane, "Hold the plane for 15 or 20 minutes. We know there's 30 people from flight A wanting to get onto flight B." We would hold the plane, send a message and send a message to all those people on the plane to say, "We're holding this plane for 15 minutes because there's 30 people," and I've been on the receiving end and I've sat there in the plane and people clap and cheer because people are coming sort of red-faced 'cause they feel bad 'cause they're slowing the other plane down. But they're coming down high-fiving.

Sarah Marzano (22:28):

I love that.

Richard Nunn (23:15):

We've saved 750-odd thousand people in terms of Connection Saver. So that's just a great way of using technology and data and joining all these dots up for a great customer experience.

Sarah Marzano (23:23):

You create this wonderful moment of camaraderie among people who are sometimes not being as nice to each other as they could be because travel is tough.

Richard Nunn (23:30):

Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent.

Marcus Johnson (23:33):

Let's end with this, Richard. What's next for traveler media?

Richard Nunn (23:41):

Well, we've got, again, through Starlink in terms of what we're enabling there, we're going to open up a whole bunch of stuff. So we've got a sort of a product roadmap of, yes, new ad formats, different ways of engaging with that customer is pretty super exciting. The other area we're also actively looking at, and we have this today, is an app within an app called Mileage Plus X. And this point about the traveler and bringing alive the traveler, because we have two currencies to play with. We have an advertising CPM model, and we have our loyalty model based on miles. And enabling e-commerce world, which we have today, where you can go and buy your Starbucks with your miles, either earn miles or redeem your miles to go and buy your Starbucks. And those types of examples kind of extend out this life of loyalty with the United outside of just the day of travel.

(24:39):

So you have kind of an all round everyday experience with that A, the brand of United and also that customer. So there's a whole bunch of opportunities around, A, 'cause we understand who these people are, what they're interested in, and what through partnerships, what can we surround their life in? Because people do see the miles that they've saved as kind of a savings plan to some degree, and how else can you use that beyond travel, which obviously that's the predominant use case. Most people use their miles for travel to get to A to B and have an amazing moment in time, but also we see a highly engaged set of audiences that want to use that outside of travel and what else can we do to enable that? So there's some exciting stuff coming down the road.

Marcus Johnson (25:25):

Nice. That brings us full circle. Because at the very beginning you were saying we have travel media forecasts, but you refer to it as traveler because there is the beginning, the during, the after. And yeah, it's nice that you're looking at it so holistically because that can really extend the offering throughout just the, I'm sitting on the plane part of it.

(25:48):

That's all we've got time for for today's episode. Thank you so, so much to my guest hanging out with me today. Thank you first to Sarah.

Sarah Marzano (25:54):

Thank you for having me.

Marcus Johnson (25:56):

Yes, indeed. Thank you to Richard.

Richard Nunn (25:57):

Thanks Marcus and Sarah. Thank you.

Marcus Johnson (26:00):

Absolutely. Thanks to the whole editing crew, Victoria, John Larson, Daniel Stewart runs the team and Sophie who does our social media. Thanks to everyone for listening in. We will be back on Monday with another episode of The Behind the Numbers Show and [inaudible 00:26:11] video podcast made possible by Connected Media, by United Airlines.