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Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
The Next-Generation of In-Flight Advertising: Passenger Receptiveness, Contextual Campaigns, and What Comes Next | Behind the Numbers
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- [00:00]
A
Take your brand to new heights with inflight advertising powered by Viasat ads. High engagement formats, targeted delivery and self service tracking make it all very, very simple. Reach millions of travelers across leading airlines. The premium captive environment. Join their journey with Viasat ads. Hey gang. It's Monday, December 22nd. Jeremy, Raghu and listeners, welcome to behind the Numbers, a new market to video podcast made possible by Vi Sat and Marcus. And joining me for today's conversation, we have two gentlemen. First is our senior director of content living in New York. It's of course Jeremy Goldman.
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B
Great to be with you. Excited for this.
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A
Hello sir. Same. And we also joined by special guest VP of media and monetization at Viasat ads living in Connecticut, it's Raghu Kamakshi Sundaru. Hello.
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C
Hello. Great to be here.
- [00:59]
A
Welcome to the show, sir. Okay, whenever we have a special guest, we start of course with a speed intro. All right, so two rapid fire questions for you, Raghu. We have first of all, what do you do in a sentence.
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C
Thank you for having me here. I build digital products to make your in flight experience more engaging and affordable.
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A
Very nice. And what, second question is your dream vacation?
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C
I'm actually planning one right now. To me, vacation is when you meaningfully disconnect and connect with the people that matter most. For me, that's my family, my wife and two kids, a teen and a tween. And we are planning to go to Greece to see Athens and Santorini. It'll be amazing to see kids visit places like me that they have learned about in school. So really looking forward to it.
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B
While they'll still hang out with you, right? I guess that's what I've heard is after they get past tween level, then it's forget it, you won't see them for a few years.
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C
Actually. Yeah, my daughter is a junior and probably will be with us at home for another year, so. Really want to make the most of this time?
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A
Absolutely. Yeah. I love that word meaningfully disconnect as well. Jeremy, how about for you?
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B
Oh my gosh. My dream vacation, I think probably it would have to be to get to Australia at one point. It's really hard when you've got dogs and you don't want to leave them for that long. And as a result it's like, I've never been to Japan. I've never been to Australia and I've had options to kind of do both and turn those down. And people were like, are you serious? And like, why are you turning this option? So you know, one day yeah, it's a dog parent.
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A
That's how it goes. But these are great choices, gents. I didn't think you could top rope, to be honest. You haven't, Jeremy, but you came close. Mine actually one of them would be Japan. So I think you hit the nail on the head there. The other is I'm desperate to do this US road trip from Azua, Montana and you go up through Glacier. We heard Montana is one of the most beautiful states in the country. You go from there up through Glacier national park into Canada and then through Calgary and you end up in Banff. So that's.
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B
And you can keep going through Canada. You can get up to Alaska if you keep going.
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A
But maybe in the summer Alaska is got the most. It's got three, I think three of the five largest national parks and just looks beautiful. So I wouldn't hate that either. It's Stuart who runs the team. I'm going to be off most of next year on vacation. Okay, this is my formal announcement. So anyway, today's real topic, the next generation of in flight advertising. All right, here we go. So research from Airlines for America shows that close to half of of the US adults have flown in the past 12 months. Even more flown obviously if you widen that time period. But that is up from a third of people flying back in 1990. And if you look at folks who make over 50 or households that make over $50,000 a year, that number goes up to 75% people who flown in the last year. So a lot of people in the sky going places and advertisements being sent to them or delivered to them. It's looked different in the past, it looks different now, obviously look different in the future. But I think to start us off, Raghu, where are we at with inflight advertising today? What does it look like?
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C
In flight advertising is nothing new. People have been advertising in flight for a long time with logos printed on napkins or flyers or brochures on seatbacks or watching the same pre roll video ad playing over and over again in front of movies and TVs on long haul flights. If you're on a long flight, you might be very familiar with this where these ads are not skippable, not targeted, not personalized and borderline annoying to the passengers. And it's not great for the brand that advertises either because they are not being associated with a good experience. Now that's the state of inflight advertising today. And that's how traditionally it's been in flight ads have been bought and sold at viasat ads, we are changing all that. We are bringing real time digital advertising capabilities to inflight experience. Viasat has been the leader in providing in flight connectivity to the two airlines. We have over 4,000 aircraft equipped with wireside connectivity today in the market. We are enabling advertising using our connectivity pipes to these airlines. We have been building a platform that brings real time targeted advertising to in flight audiences both for their entertainment content or providing free Internet connectivity while they.
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B
Are.
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C
In the airplane.
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A
So we've got sponsored Internet, we've got pre roll video before film, there's some of a bunch of different formats. In terms of how folks are advertising in the sky. I'm curious to know a bit about how ads are being targeted on the planes. Is it, how contextual is it, Is it business versus leisure? Is it cabin class membership program by seat? What does that look like?
- [06:56]
C
Yeah, so we have several inflight ad products. So you mentioned sponsored Internet. We have pre roll videos like we have live TV ads. Now in terms of these ads presented to the passengers, most of these. So the sponsored Internet video is a choice that the passenger makes like so they can, they want to connect to Internet and they have a choice of watching a video and then get free Internet. Now even the ads that they watch, the user experience has been pretty seamless and put the choice in the hands of the passenger where the passengers can choose which brand or ad to engage with. This results in much more brand recognition or brand recall of that ad. With pre roll ads we can show real time ads targeted by the route of the flight, by the origin and the destination of the flight, by the type of content you watch. Now most of these ads are really targeting a traveling audience. Just the context that you are traveling from one place A to place B is in itself very valuable for an advert advertiser. And you're engaging in this activity and knowing that information, you're able to present the most relevant ad for that road, for that context for that flight.
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B
I was going to say the contextual component of it. To me that seems like a major aspect. We're living in a world the last few years especially where the whole entire idea about using my personal data against me in some way, shape or form, there's been some pushback to that obviously. And I think that the context of just knowing where somebody is going from point A to point B, that I think that people are a little bit more bought in or advertisers are bought into. The idea that context can be a major clue that can yield some significant relevance in the Ad. So I'm wondering if you're finding that as well.
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C
Absolutely. We actually have several examples where just using this contextual data has been a huge driver of performance for an ad campaign. I'll give an example. Let's say you're traveling to an event at a particular location or destination like an industry event, like a Con or a CES or any of these events where you know there is a lot of travelers going into that destination and obviously you will fly into that destination. So knowing that information now, a brand that may be promoting at that event can expose their brand to the travelers into the event while they are in flight. So we've also seen advertisers based on again the destination. There are local advertisers that can put their sponsored message in front of passengers coming into that destination. Right. So just in this case like in context is the destination.
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A
Right.
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C
And that can be used very powerfully by advertisers.
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A
Yeah, I realized this example, it was the day article that you helped put together. There was this example you had of a running shoe brand and you say might want to target flights in and out of Boston based on the timing of the Boston Marathon. To which consumers were they going to be most receptive to that type of messaging? I think the list is endless.
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C
Absolutely. Yeah. So I mean B2B brands want to target travelers on business heavy routes. Right. And there are instances where you mentioned like being racing events. Right. I mean so where an athletic brand is advertising when passengers are traveling to a particular like mean sport sporting event like your contact.
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A
Yeah. Is there a certain type of ad or type of destination, so to speak for an event that you've seen work particularly well? Is there a best in class examples of how advertisers have done this which you would say look at how well this went and that's something that could be replicated.
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C
One of the most common ones is the event takeover which I mentioned earlier, where if you're a passenger flying to attend a large event, as soon as you get off the plane at your destination, you'll be bombarded with brand messages. But on your way to the event, when you are in flight, you're not distracted by all those different messaging. That is an opportunity for the advertiser wires that ads is enabled across multiple airlines like flying into a particular destination like so for an advertiser, they can effectively take over the entire event and target all flights going into that destination to really capture a high share of voice of passengers going to the demand. Right. So the example here is CES we did an event takeover for a brand earlier this year which was very successful for the advertiser.
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B
I think what's so interesting to me is that captive audience component of it. Right. Where you're stuck, especially if you're in the middle seat and you're like what do you do? And somebody's sleeping next to you and you're watching the screen. I feel like you have a captive audience in a way that has kind of gone to the wayside. If you think about in the world of short form video now, people are scrolling on their phone generally and you have three seconds to grab somebody's attention in an ad. And there are, I think some stories that are just not. Not well told within a three second bit. Right. So the ability to kind of lean into like a format that is a little bit more long form, the way that you or I might have grown up, I think is very valuable for certain types of advertisers.
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C
Absolutely. I think like the captive nature and the relevance of how relevant it is like to you based on what you're doing. Right. And the format, all of these come into play.
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A
I like this idea that you can target kind of every plane coming into a certain destination as opposed to saying to an advertiser, we can give you things on this route just from this airline being able to basically say every. A lot of planes are arriving at this destination when this thing is happening, when the super bowl is going on in a certain city or like I said, a big conference, maybe there's a concert happening. I don't know where it is. I think is quite powerful.
- [13:59]
C
Absolutely. And that's one of the advantages of say my asset ads because we work with multiple ad lines. We enable this for multiple ad lines. That's very different from traditionally going to a specific ad line, buying ad spots with them or a specific event organizer and buying ad spots there. So we essentially can aggregate everything at a destination.
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A
How personalized do you see this getting? Will it be the case at some point where I'm sat in a seat and having different ad serves to meet in the person next to me or the cabin in front?
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C
So there is a balance between personalizing for the passenger versus personalizing for the context of your journey? I think we are more on the end of, hey, this is context is more important. Right. And the difference here is compared to on the ground advertising. Let's say it's a hyper targeted search ad. You're trying to convert a person into doing something. You're not sitting in flight and buying a product. But this is a great opportunity to raise brand awareness. So it's not necessarily one to one target at hyper personalized using consumer data. And data and privacy are also very sensitive topics, especially in the context of an in flight environment. So we are very sensitive to that and what we enable is more on the contextual end. So it's really the journey, the origin, destination, the region, the time. The airline gives you a wealth of information and you can infer data like okay, hey, is this like a business heavy route or is this like more of a leisure route? Right. You can also infer information about like the cabin classes and target people too. Right. So it's again like more contextual than personal.
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A
So just like, is there something, as the VP of media monetization at ViaSat, is there a challenge that you're seeing that you're facing that you think is also a challenge that the industry is facing in terms of taking in flight advertising kind of to the next level, so to speak?
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C
Yeah, certainly. Right. I think of in flight advertising as one of the last areas that has not come into the modern way of advertising, buying and selling ads. Right. And the biggest challenge there is you need to be connected.
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A
Right.
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C
I mean, so the aircraft has to be connected, like the passengers have to be connected. Right. And so connectivity is a foundational component that you need. And the airlines have to first of all enable connectivity to even bring this type of experience to their passengers. Two, even if you get connected.
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A
How.
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C
Do you account for some of the challenges with you're in flight and it's not as close to a real time advertising as it, it could be on the ground. And you need to really have capabilities on the aircraft that would serve the passengers within the aircraft. It's almost like having your own servers that manage the media and content and ads serve to these passengers compared to doing everything from the cloud like you are more used to experiencing at home. Right. And that is an aviation specific challenge. There are also constraints around what type of content or ad that you can present in front of a passenger in flight and how do you manage that and curate that.
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B
Right, yeah, I was going to say, I thought what was so interesting, I thought you were going to go with measurement because it's like, you know, for the most part you're not giving people QR codes to scan. Right. Since they have got no connectivity necessarily that they're paying for, let's say, on their mobile device. So I wondered, and obviously like your whole goal I would imagine is getting people to come back and anniversary their Spend and keep coming back. So is measurement at all like a challenge or how do you kind of try to address that?
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C
Measurement is a challenge as well as an opportunity. So for us we provide very detailed measurement and insights to our advertisers because we work in a connected environment where we are able to track those ad impressions. Now in aggregate, in a lot of environments where you're not able to track the individual impression level data, then it becomes more harder. You need to do some approximations of how many people or what type of profile of the people were on the flight to understand who saw it. Also I think you're pointing to with QR code comment, how do you attribute this exposure to a certain action? These are not unique challenges for in flight. These are challenges generally with digital advertising. And we can solve for that in some unique ways in inflight because when you may have multiple screens, we have a device in hand, you have a seat back. Say for example, you can show a QR code to scan that to connect who that person is sitting in a specific seat and be able to attribute and track the performance of ad exposure for that person. So these are all some of the things that we are thinking about and starting to experiment with. But certainly measurement and insights is a challenge for most airlines, but we are trying to solve for that with our connector direct tracking of impressions and attribution data.
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A
I want to look a little further into features said a couple of games before on Christmas and he said I could maybe years before much over. So looking forward into 2026, I'll start with this more specific question and then I'll broaden it up later and ask what you're thinking about. But I wondered when you think about advertising, particularly the advertising on screens.
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C
The.
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A
Back of the seat for passengers, are you thinking that kind of the future here is more kind of branding focused, like we want to show you and advertisers and make you aware of them. Or do you see that there's a world where passengers would feel comfortable taking an action scanning a QR code if they've got WI FI connectivity or something, or maybe clicking a button to say yes, I would like a discount code sent to my email for a place that I'm going to be eating at later that day because I'm arriving in a certain destination. What does the future of it look like be?
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C
Yeah, it's a combination of all those. I think brand ads are probably the most common, if you will, in in flight environments, especially because of like the measurement challenges and attribution challenges et Cetera, as well as the lack of real time delivery capabilities like traditionally in this environment. Right. But now with more and more connected device coming on, we can actually track and attribute better. We can also experiment with partnering with the airlines and putting a QR code or integrating the loyalty data with advertising and be able to get better insights. So those are some of the things that we are already working on.
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A
To.
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C
Expand beyond brand advertising and into more focused like in conversion based advertising, especially like if you're going to a specific destination. Another area of opportunity is also interactive transactions in flight that requires connectivity, of course in flight. But if you remember the old days of people selling duty free or goods within the flight with a catalog, I.
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B
Was just thinking about that. Could that be an opportunity to almost bring that back in a meaningful way?
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C
Absolutely. And we have capabilities where we can onboard our own partners that provide such onboard retail or other transaction based capabilities in flight. Because it's not just in base connectivity and advertising that we have in flight, but we can also enable any kind of transaction with the passengers. So really turning the inflight experience into more of not just like awareness, but also retail and transaction experiences in flight, in addition to of course the entertainment and content that's available in flight.
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A
I think final question for me is thinking about specifically 2026 and you covered a fair amount just in that last answer. But if I asked you for just one thing that you're thinking about with regards to in flight advertising in 2026, what comes to mind for you?
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C
So I think in flight advertising is like one of the last remaining areas. How ads are bought using the traditional method, if you will. Right. But that's changing fast. And in flight ad inventory, I mean today most of this is not bought through the digital ad ecosystem. But that's going to change, especially with connectivity becoming ubiquitous. And we expect this trend to accelerate in 2026. We see this firsthand wiresat ad enabled airlines and ad inventory is expected to grow dramatically in 2026. Right. And we are also bringing more real time access to this ad inventory at scale across airlines to all advertisers. And passengers will also come to expect the same level of relevance and personalization that they expect at home when they see ads in flight. Airlines will actively work towards meeting that expectation and building the capabilities to do that.
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B
That'll I think be really fun to see because I think that they're are so many advertisers who are thirsting for. How do I reinforce whatever I'm telling in one channel. The story that I'm telling in other channels and I think being able to I'm kind of interested in this inventory but I don't really know how to buy it and making it more accessible. We've seen that as a trend throughout the last few years and I think if you look at our programmatic ad spending forecast, you see that's just continuing to expand.
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C
Absolutely. In fact, being programmatic is another aspect of bringing real time advertising in flight. If you look at I mentioned, Viasat has connectivity installed on about 4,000 plus aircraft in the world, but Viasat ADS enabled airlines, which is a subset of our entire installed base, we're able to reach more than quarter of a billion passengers annually. And being able to reach those many passengers at scale and doing real time decisioning on what ads to serve will require integration to programmatic type capabilities. That's all part of the foundation of bringing in flight advertising into the digital or integrating in flight advertising into the digital ad ecosystem.
- [26:44]
A
Well, that's what we have time for, unfortunately. Thank you so much to my guests for hanging out with me today. Thank you. First Jeremy.
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B
Yeah, pleasure as always.
- [26:50]
A
Yes sir. Thank you.
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C
Of course, to review thank you very much for having me.
- [26:55]
A
Yeah, it's very nice to have you on the show. Thank you, of course, to the whole production crew and to everyone for listening into behind the Muslim Marketer video podcast made possible by viasat ads. Make sure you subscribe and follow Leave a rating and review if you have a moment. Wednesday, you can hang out with Susie David Canyon on the Reimagining Retailer show as she goes through our 2025 retailer awards.