NEW YORK — United Airlines in June unveiled Kinective Media, billed because the airline industry’s first media network. Drawing insights and data from 110 million travelers and 40 million MileagePlus frequent flyers, the offering quickly partnered with brands including Norwegian Cruise Line, Macy’s, Chase United Co-Brand Credit Cards and more.
Mike Petrella was hired as managing director of strategic partnerships in September 2023 and has served as a key leader in the event of Kinective Media. Previously, the manager spent 23 years in the identical corporate ecosystem, from being the third worker at Advertising.com through acquisitions by AOL and Yahoo. Petrella was “amazed” at how dynamic United was expanding right into a white space area as a virtually 100-year-old company.
“I believed I used to be coming into an old skool environment, but even our CEO could be very forward considering,” Petrella said. “The way he communicates to his leadership team could be very ‘fail first, fail fast, fail forward,’ and I wasn’t expecting that.”
Marketing Dive spoke with Petrella between sessions at Advertising Week New York in regards to the lessons he learned from helping arise a media offering, the necessity for data privacy laws and where the media landscape goes from here.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: You said in a panel that you simply launched a multimillion dollar business in nine months and your first audience extension campaign three and a half months to the day you began. What does it take to go to market that quickly?
MIKE PETRELLA: You need buy-in from everyone and I believe that was the thing that was most impressive to me with the team. There was a willingness to be educated and influenced.
One of my friends gave me the perfect advice: You may not know all of the answers, but the questions to ask. You have to educate yourself when it comes to the opposite constructing blocks. So from an information perspective, where is our data set today, where do we wish it to go tomorrow? As we construct a sales organization, how will we construct in such a way that’s conducive and complementary to what we’ve stood up ahead of their presence?
We were smart when it comes to the alternatives we made, since it allowed us to be dynamic and fluid. We didn’t get locked into anything, and that was the important thing. In this industry, all the things changes and nothing changes unexpectedly, but you’ve got to give you the option to pivot quickly.
How did you approach constructing the team?
We didn’t usher in one airline person for ad tech, which is nice and bad. As we construct this business, there are nuances with this industry relative to others — “Here’s why this button is red and this button is blue” — but we brought in the proper people. We brought in senior people as well. We built from the highest down versus the underside up, and in doing so, you might get things moving on a really senior level. Contacts, networking and just overall industry knowledge really helped us drive that forward at an expeditious rate.
Quick scale is the hard part. It’s not a plug and play, where, now that you’ve got data, you make billions of dollars. It’s setting it up the proper way to scale and protect our customers.
Rome wasn’t inbuilt a day. We could have done this very otherwise and just went out and made our data available all over the place. There are risks, there are bad actors, there’s compliance. You could make a billion dollars real quick. But is that sustainable? No.
Speaking of compliance, what do you think that of the information privacy landscape?
I would like federal laws so badly. I believe all of us do. There’s [about 20 state] laws today. So we’re compliant in that sense, however it’s like Whac-a-Mole.
We even have a team in D.C. right by the White House… they provided lots of perspective that I didn’t understand from the federal government’s perspective on what we ought to be doing and how we ought to be doing it. The more we partner with them, the higher off we’ll be when it comes to being on the forefront, but I’m asking for that laws: Give me it, allow us to be the poster child of what’s to occur.
You’ve spoken about creating an in-flight “front room experience.” When it comes to media, is there a meaningful distinction between endemic and non-endemic advertisers?
Honestly, there’s not. Even besides the front room experience, we’re constructing these profiles based on intelligence and insights we extract from 110 million travelers and 40 million MileagePlus folks. You are who you might be, whether you fly to a destination or come home.
I believe it’s more about that personalization, where it becomes complimentary, not creepy: “Welcome to the United lounge. Did you get that rash checked out?” No! We know you’re a foodie or we all know you’re a Mets fan, regardless of the case is.
Netflix does the perfect job of it: “Here’s what we expect you’d like based on what you’ve watched.” Well, I actually have many more signals, not only what you watched, but what you got, the way you acted, where you stayed. How about I put that in front of you? It’s that immersion and personalization of the journey, because travel’s a hassle when it comes down to it. How can I take the effort out of that? How can I make it a bit of bit easier?
With increasing fragmentation within the media network space, what’s your pitch to advertisers?
There has to be some cleansing up of this industry. It is way too fragmented, marketers have way too many selections and everyone [says they’ve] got the perfect data on the earth.
If we will prove our price, and we will prove it in such a way that it checks off multiple boxes, not only I checked off my commerce media box, but somewhat, I’m able to, on a real omnichannel basis, see, track and measure the experience — that’s invaluable.
We’re doing what nobody’s done before, the primary airline to market. If a brand comes back and says, “That really worked” — and we’re getting that, now we have the renewals from our launch partners — it’s only a matter of the virility of success being true, especially inside an agency. One buyer or planner finds out, and like that “Brady Bunch” screen, it goes from like eight to 18 [people]. I believe that’s going to be the impact, but now we have to get it right on the very start. You only get one test sometimes.
How will the convergence of commerce media and connected TV play out in Kinective?
[We have] a shoppable experience today on our screens — it’s probably not true CTV, since it’s not being loaded in real time — but you may buy concert tickets in your routes to Vegas. You should purchase or get details about Macallan or Bottega Veneta.
[Ad-supported video on demand] is gonna be much more attractive to us, but the information in itself, coupled with the media, allows you to hit that branding message and that shoppable transaction message, whether it’s click the screen [or not].
I believe it’s more just focused on the person. Where do they spend their time? Where are they watching? Are they streaming? Are they on an app? Whatever the case is, how will we complement the experience? That’s the patron side.
The marketer side is yet one more platform to measure that we will’t measure today. I’m sure there’s six panels today on CTV measurement and lack thereof. That needs to be solved. I’d like to be one among the primary that brings that omnichannel measurement solution into play.
There’s not a silver bullet. There’s a variety of brands which have multiple partners, one among them has 12. That’s lots of contracts. It’s challenging.
Are the trade bodies and industry groups helping on that?
The IAB is doing their best to get there, and I would like to be a part of the answer. It’s easy for me to sit here and complain, but at the top of the day, I actually need to drive to some sort of answer, and I’m unsure what it’s yet. Let’s work together to test and determine how to distill all the knowledge into one means, and if you’ve got uniformity when it comes to standards, metrics, whatever else, that makes it so much easier.
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