United Airlines has been adding seat back video screens to planes, and they’re planning to put the fastest internet in the sky on board – Starlink – starting next year. This is great for customers, but it’s all part of a plan to monetize the eyeballs of customers sitting on their planes.
United hired an executive from Comcast to become CEO of MileagePlus, and his job is to develop the airline’s custom targeted advertising platform, using the data they have on customers to bring the right commercial message to the right passenger at the right time. They call it Kinective Media, and believe this can boost the ad revenue they generate significantly. During its third quarter earnings call the airline said this would make “a little bit of money” next year and “really start[..] to accelerate in ’26 and beyond.”
Let’s check in on how inflight advertising is going, for one United customer, who reports watching a phone sex commercial on their seat back screen.
My @united flight is currently airing a #PhoneSex commercial on my seat TV.
Also, the seat and table were REALLY dirty. They gave us sanitizing wipes for that.
This is weird pic.twitter.com/Zr4F9dG4nX
— David Hankla (@Hankla) October 26, 2024
I have to think this one either isn’t attributable to the new targeting effort, which is only getting underway, or that those new targeting efforts are a lot farther along than United has shared (!). What do they know about this member who’s getting the phone sex ad on board? In fact, this is likely just content that any passenger would see on their inflight entertainment, which I suppose is just as shocking or even more so. It’s being shown to everyone, not just a few United thinks want to see it. Real targeting can’t come soon enough!
Indeed, a United spokesperson offers,
[T]he ad shown in that tweet must have been shown on one of the regular TV channels viewable via DirectTV on some United flights. This was just a regular TV ad, the same as would have been visible to any other viewer of that TV channel.
United has a lot of data about their customers. The Kinective project puts that data to use, letting advertisers better target their messaging, for instance putting local ads in front of passengers as they head to a destination city. They know where a member is from, where they’re traveling, how old they are. They also know what stores they’ve made purchases from, crediting the transactions to their United mileage account.
U.S. carriers never put ads on overhead bins, like on a bus, but they did have flight attendants announce credit card signup opportunities on early morning flights when passengers are trying to sleep. This new effort takes a more high-tech, targeted approach which should make ads perform better (you’re more likely to buy) and lets United sell access to you at a higher price.
They probably couldn’t sell phone sex services in the inflight magazine and maybe doing so through seat back entertainment is a bit much? They should probably stick to pushing this one more discretely, in the United mobile app.
That looks to me like a DirecTV screen. In which case, I don’t think United has control of any of the content, since it’s all cable networks and such.
Not that the Kinective Media stuff doesn’t bother me, but this isn’t that.
Another click bait post by Gary. Could it be any more obvious that this is DirecTV live tv? They’re pushing out the same commercials to every one, has nothing to do with being or a plane or having individually ads. Normally the click bait is just kind of annoying but this is the kind of post that moves view from the wing into tabloid territory.
Yep – typical Gary over reaction and paranoia. BTW – people are prudes. Just ignore something you may not like or care about. Doubt just viewing something traumatized this person. On the other hand way too many snowflakes now
Not even a teaspoon full of digging before writing and publishing a whole article about a random anecdote?
It’s a DirecTV live TV ad, we know better
I’ve never owned any television , and I hope I’m the better for it . Television owners have Camel-a non-brains .
Alright Gary bashers: just don’t read the blog and stop boring the rest of us with your complaints. Gary is right. That ad is totally inappropriate content for a display on a public carrier. It doesn’t matter whether it came from DirectTV or not. Irresponsible of United to allow that to happen.
Bryce, that’s not the point of his post. The headline literally mentions targeted ads.
If you want to have a legitimate discussion about whether that ad should be on an aircraft screen, target that feedback to Gary, not the posters rightly calling him out.
Regarding targeted ads: I live in FL and we get very little presidential advertising, but I’m currently visiting my parents in NJ and there are a lot of ads targeted at homophobes. I guess that’s a big part of the demographic in the Phila marketing region.
Are 800 phone sex numbers really still a thing anymore?
I’m an atheist, and I’ve gotta say the world is going to Hell.
If I were the customer with a phone,I would of taken a picture of the ad for evidence and I would of confronted the staff & the airline company once I got off the plane and I would of asked them if this was Appropriate material for showing on their tv screens and I would bet you they would say No. After that I would of sent the screen shot to a news agency to expose the airline company for show Inappropriate Garbage on a flight and then watch how the airline company squirms
Phone sex is probably less psychologically damaging than the violence in main stream movies.
What is UA supposed to do? Disable all of the live satellite channels and only offer the canned ~9 movies that run on a loop that you cannot pause/rewind when these 737s operate outside the lower 48?
Again I agree with jns and I’ll add to main stream movies, the MSM 24/7 “news” and the violent video games.
“We are all fragile . . . it’s the thing we lean in a war.” and I’ll add old age.
@Robin – are you that much of a snowflake and are you so sheltered that this REALLY bothers you? If so there are real issues and I can’t imagine being that prudish.