Partnerships that pay off. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets. impact.com helps you automate your affiliate, influencer, and referral programs with insights + tools. Turn connections into cash.
For the chronically online, one of the most painful parts of flying might be disconnecting from content creators.
Now, Delta passengers don’t need to.
Through a new partnership with YouTube, the airline is introducing ad-free content from certain creators to seatback screens and other in-flight entertainment accessible via personal devices. As part of the deal, podcasts, music, and videos from creators including Kinigra Deon, MrBeast, Michelle Khare, and Mother Goose Club will be available for Delta customers to tune into during flights.
YouTube is the most-watched streaming service in the US, per Nielsen, and offering it on seatback screens will keep Delta’s programming up to speed with modern media habits, according to Julieta McCurry, VP of in-flight entertainment and connectivity at Delta.
“Our data was actually telling us that customers want personalization and they want choice,” McCurry told Marketing Brew. “We saw that there was an increasing turn to creator-driven content and podcasts that really reflects the interests of the customers.”
Like the TV, film, and streaming brands that came before them, creators who are part of the program stand to get a boost from being part of airlines’ seat-back entertainment options and find new audiences mid-flight, representing just the latest way creators are expanding off of YouTube.
Up, up, and away
Delta’s YouTube partnership, first announced at CES earlier this year, was a year in the making, according to McCurry, and is designed to reflect the company’s vision of the future of travel and entertainment. One major difference? YouTube content will be ad-free in order to align with other viewing experiences on Delta.
“This is a premium experience,” McCurry said.
Creator Kinigra Deon, whose content is part of the partnership, said creating a premium experience was also important to her. While her typical viewers may be accustomed to ad breaks unless they pay for YouTube Premium, she said, she hopes that viewing her content in this seat-back context might lead to increased interest later on.
“I’m hoping that once the passenger lands, it allows them to [think], ‘Who was that? I want to watch more,’” Deon told Marketing Brew. “Go watch 1,000 more once [they] figure out that I have 1,000 other videos.”
To choose the creator content featured on planes, McCurry said Delta worked closely with YouTube and placed a priority on diversity. “We have a very diverse customer base by the nature of being a global airline, and so we wanted to make sure that there was a cultural relevance with these creators across the board,” she said.
The current creator content selection will remain available for the next few months, a timeframe that will allow the team to glean audience insights, McCurry said.Content performance will eventually be evaluated on a monthly basis, like the rest of the programming available on Delta Studio, the airline’s in-flight entertainment platforms.
“It’s important to stay current, and important that we are delivering the type of content that customers are looking for,” McCurry said. “We’ve got a lot of frequent travelers as well, so we want to make sure that we keep the content fresh and relevant for them.”
Living room in the sky
For Deon, the opportunity to distribute her content on Delta was a dream, since she considers herself to be a “Delta girl” through and through, she said.
Deon sees her content as fitting in on Delta’s in-flight experience because of how the platform mirrors the home watching environment. About 70% of her content’s watch time already comes from CTVs, she said, and she hopes her long-form, scripted content will feel at home next to the feature-length films and traditional TV shows that plane audiences might already expect.
The seatback and in-flight experience is ad-free, and Delta isn’t paying creators to make their YouTube content available on its planes. But for creators like Deon, the promise of exposure and potential new audiences—plus the opportunity to revel in a new milestone with her existing audience—is more than enough, she said.
According to McCurry, the plane audience is uniquely positioned to pay deeper attention to programs while flying and to seek to continue their entertainment journeys after their flights. In this sense, creators on planes are set up to build connections with audiences in a whole new way.
“The aircraft is really a very unique environment,” McCurry said. “It’s offering creators and YouTube an opportunity unlike anywhere else where you have this uninterrupted, guaranteed engagement in an age that is really defined by fragmented, hyper-short attention spans everywhere else.”
Read the full article here
