In this episode of The Big Impression, we’re joined by James Rothwell, managing director of brand marketing at Kinective Media. Rothwell walks us through what’s changed since launch — from major brand partnerships and custom content integrations to a headline-making alliance with JetBlue. With over 110 million traveler profiles and 63 million MileagePlus members, Kinective is fast becoming one of the most compelling new players in commerce media.

Episode Transcript

Please note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.

Damian Fowler (00:00 ):

I'm Damian Fowler.

Ilyse Liffreing (00:01 ):

And I'm Ilyse Liffreing.

Damian Fowler (00:02 ):

And welcome to this edition of The Big Impression.

Ilyse Liffreing (00:09 ):

Today we're checking back in on one of the boldest moves in airline media, connected media by United Airlines as they've redefined what's possible in the world of Traveler Media Networks.

Damian Fowler (00:22 ):

Our guest is James Rothwell, managing director of brand marketing at Connective Media. James and his team are helping United leverage the power of 110 million traveler profiles, create new opportunities for brands across the entire customer journey.

Ilyse Liffreing (00:38 ):

We actually spoke with Connective on this podcast just last year and just a week after they launched. A lot has happened since then from major brand partnerships to rapid innovation in tech content and measurement, and today we're catching up on what's new. So let's get into it.

Damian Fowler (00:57 ):

So James, this time last year, United had just launched Connective Media. It was June, 2024 at CAN, and it was the first airline media network. Could you walk us through what's happened since then? How has the network grown? How has it attracted brand campaigns and how is it working?

James Rothwell (01:20 ):

Yeah, absolutely. And thank you Damian, for having me on. This is great to be here. We just celebrated our first birthday, which is a wonderful thing. We're engaging with so many different types of brands who are interested in reaching a premium traveler audience. We've seen some success in most of the key verticals that you would imagine, and then some surprising ones too. And obviously it's a slam dunk for a travel brand or a destination brand, but those non-endemic brands, the non-endemic advertisers who are trying to reach travelers, no matter where they are in their journey or even in between journeys, we're finding really interesting use cases, really interesting targeting options and ways for them to be able to reach them across all of our screens. And on,

Damian Fowler (02:08 ):

Let's get into it a little further. Can you give us some examples? And you mentioned non endemics as well, but maybe we could start with the endemics and then move on to the non endemics.

James Rothwell (02:17 ):

No, absolutely. I think travel as a category is a growth sector right now. I think ever since the pandemic, people have been looking to explore the world and get out of the, I mean, they were cooped up for quite a while there, and so travel's never been more popular. Like any industry, you've got to break through the noise and the options that you have out there. Right? World's a big place.

(02:43 ):

Luckily we fly to a lot of different places. We have over 330 different destinations. One really interesting case study that we've just completed was with the Cayman Islands tourist board, and they were looking to drive passengers travelers to the Cayman Islands, and they worked with us across all of our media, and we were able to do closed loop attribution based on the bookings that were then made to those destinations. So for us, measurement and measurability is incredibly strong in the travel sector and the travel space. We were able to see basically with Cayman Islands, that 9,000 bookings came from exposure to the ads that ran across email, across our club lounges and in our entertainment seat back screens on the planes. So we were able to drive awareness, intent, and then conversion, and we were able to track that and they saw a 13 times return on an ad spend against that campaign. We were incredibly happy with that. They were incredibly happy with that. We obviously made some travelers very happy to go enjoy the wonderful blues ocean around the Cayman Islands.

Damian Fowler (03:58 ):

Yeah, there's something nice when you see that on screen. You're

James Rothwell (04:01 ):

Like that, I'm going to go there. Yeah, that looks nice. That one sells itself. It

Ilyse Liffreing (04:05 ):

Does. So you mentioned non-endemic brands too. That's really interesting.

James Rothwell (04:09 ):

Yeah, I mean, we're all travelers, right? We all got on a plane to be here in Cannes. It doesn't define us, but certainly it helps to give context and potentially insights around who we are as individuals and what we like to spend our money on where we like to spend our time. And so that translates into a really interesting audience segment for different brands. So we've had a lot of luck and a lot of success with luxury brands who want to reach, especially front of plane individuals. B2B brands has been a real boon for us as well. Business decision makers, they're looking to find those individuals and we can find 'em on the planes in the clubs and through different digital channels as well. And so that's been a really interesting sector that we've been able to really capitalize on, and I think they've been able to see some significant growth on that. And we work with, for example, JIRA, which is an Atlassian product, and they did a full omnichannel activation with us and they saw some fantastic results there.

Ilyse Liffreing (05:16 ):

Very cool. Could you describe that a little bit more, how, I guess you worked almost in a custom way, it sounds like With Jira

James Rothwell (05:26 ):

For that one was very custom. In fact, they had their own branding moment and wanted to use some of that branding and creativity and plug it into the inflight entertainment screen. So we created a custom channel for them with curated content behind it, which then obviously gave them a branding moment and an opportunity to drive their messaging with more engagement. So that was a very custom moment, but also an opportunity for us to do very targeted work to find the right audience members throughout the journey.

Ilyse Liffreing (05:56 ):

We spoke with Mike Petre on this podcast just about a year ago, A week after you guys

James Rothwell (06:02 ):

Launched. That's right.

Ilyse Liffreing (06:03 ):

It seems that you're moving fast and obviously moving on to things like custom solutions and everything like that. What else is new in the past 12 months

James Rothwell (06:12 ):

Where to start? We've been bringing on a significant amount of partners, not only on the technical side, but also on the content side. So most recently we did a deal with Spotify. We're very excited about that partnership. Again, from a content perspective and an engagement perspective, tha