ON ADVERTISING
LONDON: 'Please return your seat backs and tray tables to their upright and locked position - and start reading the advertisement that is staring you in the face.”
O.K., you won't actually hear that last part as the flight attendants prepare an aircraft for landing. But as airlines look for new sources of revenue to offset rising fuel costs, more carriers are turning planes into marketing vehicles, installing advertising in hard-to-miss places.
Several American carriers, including US Airways and AirTran, recently started selling ads on napkins or stickers that appear on open tray tables. Over the summer, Ryanair, the European low-fare carrier, has gone further, installing advertising panels on the covers of the overhead luggage compartments and in the backs of closed tray tables.
Ryanair, and the companies behind these advertising systems, say the new spots offer marketers an effective way to reach consumers who have cash to spend and who are increasingly difficult to influence via traditional media like television and newspapers.
InviseoMedia, which has sold the seat-back ads to Ryanair and another European low-fare carrier, Germanwings, says the system provides an average of 40 minutes of “dwell time” during a typical flight. In other words, the only ways for passengers to avoid the ads, which are placed behind tamper-proof plastic shields, is to open the tray or get up and stretch their legs. When they do that, they are confronted with the ads on the overhead bins, which are being sold by a separate company, Fourth Edition.
“It's a good medium, a good audience and they're captive to some extent,” said Dominic Stead, chief executive of Inviseo. “In this day and age, the opportunity to get someone's attention and hold it is invaluable.”
Inviseo started to install its panels in Germanwings planes about two years ago, and companies like Microsoft, DaimlerChrysler, Hewlett-Packard and HRS, a German travel Web site, have advertised on them.
Since the seat-back ad space became available in Ryanair planes this summer, it has attracted only one advertiser: Creative, a maker of digital entertainment devices. But Stead said the Inviseo system could be popular with advertisers that link ads to mobile phone call-in and text-message campaigns, because Ryanair and a number of other airlines plan to enable in-flight cellphone use soon.
The use of overhead bins for ads has been faster to catch on than the seat backs, with ads being place by companies like ING, the Dutch bank; Red Bull, a so-called energy drink; and Meteor Mobile Communications, an Irish cellphone operator. Martin Barry, managing director of Fourth Edition, said the ads could generate annual revenue of €6.5 million, or $8.8 million, if all 41 panels on every one of Ryanair's 137 planes were sold for an entire year. Like Inviseo, Fourth Edition splits an undisclosed portion of the proceeds with the airline.
Both Fourth Edition and Inviseo, which are privately held, say they have an advantage over potential rivals because they have already obtained approval for their systems, as required by safety regulators.
Will other advertisers and airlines climb aboard? Even though marketers are eager to connect with consumers in new ways, they are also wary about annoying them.
“A lot of brands are pretty skeptical about being associated with in-flight advertising,” said Ben Cunningham, a media planner at Vizeum, part of the London advertising company Aegis. “In general, it has been something pretty niche for us to advise our clients to get involved with.”
Other forms of airborne advertising have been around for some time. Carriers have turned the outsides of airplane fuselages into flying billboards. They have sold print ads in their magazines, and some offer video ads in their seat-back entertainment systems. Several carriers have even experimented with ads printed on airsickness bags.
Fourth Edition and Inviseo said they were talking with other airlines. But one budget carrier, easyJet, said it was not interested for now. “Onboard advertising is not something we're looking to at the moment,” said Marianne West, a spokeswoman. “I think we're quite happy to advertise our own brand onboard.”
Eric Pfanner can be reached at adcol@iht.com.
