[Blog] Generating ancillary revenue through in-flight advertising

You can walk past a billboard and miss it because you were too busy looking at your phone, you can flip through the advertisement page while reading your magazine, you can skip digital ads that appear before you start a video…. but

“Do you ignore an ad that is staring at you, right in-front of your eyes, while you’re sitting in a plane?”

Being bored and sitting in one place makes the audience sponge-like at gathering and processing information – which is what advertisers like to take advantage of. In-flight advertising ensures that the target audience is a captive audience that is not getting up and going anywhere for a while

“And that’s the power of in-flight advertising.”

For airlines, ancillary revenue generated through sale of non-ticket items such as à-la-carte fees frequent flyer and priority passes is the way to go! The traditional overhead lockers and setback tray tables ads offer limited scale, but now in-flight connectivity and digital media advertising is a category that can offer scale.

Airlines are increasingly aware of the potential hidden in advertising within video content and in-flight apps. Airlines also recognize the information shared by passengers such as meal preferences offers an unparalleled potential to embed targeted digital ads natively.

Rise of targeted advertising

Day in and out, airlines hear from strategy consultants that with the rise of-flight connectivity, an opportunity exists to create customer centric marketing strategies using passenger data such that smarter, more personalized ad targeting can be conducted to meet their ancillary revenue goals. The media houses are keen to exploit the opportunities IFEC (in-flight entertainment and connectivity) data-based advertising bring and the projections are bullish.

“London School of Economics forecasts $10.8Billion as the in-flight advertising market size by 2035”

While airlines are tying up with content creators on a revenue-sharing basis to drive tailored adverts, airlines will see that a new consumer behavior is taking shape with IFEC both with content consumption habit and digital interactions enabled.

The vast range of inflight interactions possible today for modern digital traveler opens up a much wider opportunity to drive ads in a real-time and personalized fashion.

At FrontM, we see the airline app in addition to the W-IFE portal as a great digital customer engagement channel to add our interactive moving maps, destination explorer, loyalty points management etc. while infusing the most relevant ads. We are jump-starting the digital ad revenue generation journey for our airline customers and the results are quite mindboggling.

There couldn’t be a more exciting and promising time for Airlines, IFE and Connectivity providers to unlock their share of $10.8 Billion revenues than NOW!