apex multimedia market
Dublin 2019
Digital Native Taking online content on board
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Just Your
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Luck!
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Here’s a handy list of places nearby to have good craic.
RESTAURANTS 1. Dax Restaurant 23 Pembroke Street Upper 2. The Greenhouse 21 Dawson Street 3. Sussex Restaurant 8/9 Sussex Terrace, Leeson Street Upper 4. The Little Kitchen 129 Leeson Street Upper 5. Canal Bank Café 146 Leeson Street Upper 6. Forest Avenue 8 Sussex Terrace, Sussex Road
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BARS & CAFÉS 7. Alfie Byrne’s Earlsfort Terrace 8. Café en Seine 40 Dawson Street 9. The Barge 42 Charlemont Street 10. 3fe 7 Sussex Mews, Sussex Terrace 11. O’Donoghues 15 Merrion Row 12. Toners 139 Baggot Street Lower
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NETWORKING PARTY & QUIZ NIGHT
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EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and ely bar & grill CHQ Building
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YOU ARE HERE
Clayton Hotel Burlington Road Leeson Street Upper
ILLUSTRATION: MATHIAS SIELFELD
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PHOTO: EPIC THE IRISH EMIGRATION MUSEUM
A Portrait of Ireland’s History
EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and ely bar & grill CHQ Building 16 April 19:30–22:30
This year’s networking party will begin at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Hear the voices of Ireland’s most famous literary exports at its Whispering Library, featuring remastered audio from 100 years ago. The museum and then later the ely bar & grill, where dinner, live music and the crowd-favorite quiz night will take place, are housed within Dublin’s historic CHQ Building, famous for hosting a banquet for 3,000 Irish soldiers on their return from the Crimean War in 1856. APEX MULTIMEDIA MARKET
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News Bites Ready, Get Synced, Go! Emirates customers can now create an in-flight entertainment (IFE) playlist before they fly. After a trip is booked, customers can select the movies and programs they want to watch using the airline’s app. Once on board, they can access their playlist by connecting their mobile device to the in-flight Wi-Fi and entering their seat number, at which point they will be prompted to input the passcode displayed on their phone into the seatback screen.
Hitting the Right Note
Since February, passengers traveling on Iberia flights from Madrid to New York City or Tel Aviv have been able to rent Inflight VR’s Pico headsets to experience 3-D and virtual reality (VR) content. “We learned about Inflight VR through Hangar 51, IAG’s startup accelerator program,” said Ignacio Toval, Iberia’s director of Digital Transformation. “Since 2017, we’ve been working to develop a VR solution that can offer a new experience to our customers.”
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ILLUSTRATIONS: FELIPE VARGAS
Putting Virtual Reality to the Test
A partnership with Apple Music means American Airlines (AA) passengers flying domestically can use the carrier’s in-flight Wi-Fi for free to stream from their Apple Music accounts. Passengers who don’t have a subscription to the audio streaming platform can sign up for a complimentary three-month trial while on board. AA passengers will also have access to exclusive artist interviews and city-themed playlists as well as to Apple Music’s Beats 1 global livestream. “For most travelers, having music to listen to on the plane is just as important as anything they pack in their suitcases,” said Oliver Schusser, VP of Apple Music. “With the addition of Apple Music on American flights, we are excited that customers can now enjoy their music in even more places.”
News Bites
iQIYI Videos Now Playing on Air New Zealand
Right Ad, Right Time
Air New Zealand partnered with one of China’s largest online video platforms, iQIYI, to provide Chinese language content for its IFE system. Videos include episodes of XFun Foodie Club (some of which were shot in New Zealand); i Beauty, which covers the latest fashion trends; and this year’s top Chinese reality show, Hot Blood Dance Crew. Beijingbased iQIYI has more than 500 million monthly active users. Renowned for producing original content, the platform has already signed partnerships with Warner Bros. and Netflix.
Inflight Media Digital (IMD), a subsidiary of Inflight Media Marketing (IMM) International known for its AirSAS in-flight ad-serving solution, has launched AirPMP, a new marketplace enabling advertisers to browse the ad-space inventory available on airline seatback and wireless entertainment systems. While AirSAS places ads based on passenger nationality, age, gender or route, AirPMP matches airline offers and advertiser demands to optimize the buying and selling of advertising space. Realtime statistics on number of impressions and clickthrough rates are updated at every aircraft takeoff and landing.
APEX Addresses Concerns Regarding Cameras on Seatback Screens Some airlines have been under scrutiny over the presence of cameras in seatback screens after a tweet from a Singapore Airlines passenger went viral. APEX has stated that, while not in use by airlines today, in-flight cameras will enable improved passenger service in the future. The association highlighted several possible applications of seatback cameras but insisted that airlines must only use them after obtaining explicit permission from passengers in advance, each time. Read the full story: apex.aero/seatback-cameras
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News Bites Immersive Meditation PXCom has partnered with Charlotte Dodson TV and SkyLights to develop TravelWell, a health and wellnessfocused channel, available to airlines through PXCom’s XPlore IFE platform. TravelWell features guided meditation, nutrition advice and seated and standing exercises in video, audio, digital and virtual reality formats. The channel can be accessed through seatback screens, on passengers’ personal devices or through SkyLights’ AlloSky VR headset. “For many people, travel can be a stressful experience,” said Ruta Boguzaite, SkyLights’ head of Content, “… making [the airplane seat] an ideal place for relaxation content, especially when delivered in VR. In VR, viewers can be transported to a calming, new environment. Whether it’s sitting by a lake or under the aurora borealis, VR works with meditation content to further enhance passenger well-being.”
Listen to This Story
AirFi has launched an electronic dance music (EDM) streaming platform for inflight entertainment. DANCE24, created in partnership with EDM distributor Borderless Music Content Distribution (BMCD), features a catalog of over 1,200 hours of content from the world’s biggest EDM festivals and DJs. Through AirFi, DANCE24 is available across 15 airlines and more than 200 aircraft.
Gulf Air is collaborating with Alrawi Books to offer passengers Arabic fiction, management, education, self-development and children’s audiobooks in flight. Co-founded by three Bahraini entrepreneurs, the company describes itself as a sociocultural platform that aims to enable the creation and distribution of Arabic audiobooks by fostering a community of member studios and contributing publishers, authors and narrators.
ILLUSTRATIONS: FELIPE VARGAS
Dance the Flight Away
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News Bites And Now… a Passenger Service Announcement Interactive Mobility has unveiled proprietary technology that pauses inflight entertainment during passenger announcements, without crew or pilot intervention. When any of the company’s Flymingo wireless IFE boxes connected to an aircraft’s electrical network picks up a signal from the onboard public address system, it promptly pauses streaming. “This is a long-awaited product feature. Airlines came to us because they wanted a fully automated way to comply with passenger announcement regulations,” said Tanguy Morel, Interactive Mobility’s CEO.
Delta Raises Awareness on Human Trafficking To coincide with Human Trafficking Awareness Month in January, Delta Air Lines produced a video with anti-human trafficking experts Polaris that was screened on all flights equipped with seatback screens. The video provided the number for the National Human Trafficking hotline, a resource for victims to access support and for passengers to report human trafficking in the United States. Allison Ausband, Delta’s senior vice-president of In-Flight Service, said, “We are introducing a customer awareness campaign that will unite us all – sending a clear message to traffickers that they are not welcome on our planes or in our airports.”
The Spy Thriller We Loved British Airways revealed that Red Sparrow, a spy thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence (based on a 2013 novel of the same name), was its most-watched film on board in 2018. The Greatest Showman and Kingsman: The Golden Circle took second and third place, respectively. In terms of television programming, Blue Planet II: One Ocean was the most popular, followed by Peppa Pig and Prince Harry and Meghan: Truly, Madly, Deeply. And when it came to music, Beethoven’s nine symphonies proved to be the most popular audio content.
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How Will Access to Viewership Data Change the Distribution Industry? Viewership data is changing how airlines choose in-flight entertainment, but how will it affect the other parties in the content supply chain? Neal Rothman, president of Entertainment in Motion, believes one of the biggest upcoming changes for distributors of in-flight entertainment (IFE) content will be a result of airlines having increased access to viewership data. “In the past, airlines have come up with a content strategy based on market research and anecdotal evidence, but not from any comprehensive source of information,” Rothman explains. He notes that current systems are not providing airlines with figures on anywhere near 100 percent of their routes, but the advent of new analytics platforms are changing this. Being able to prove the value of certain content, such as native digital content, could lead to increased revenues for this type of programming – it is currently much cheaper than traditional content – as it becomes more relevant to a growing number of passengers. “This content is increasingly popular among younger consumers, who might not yet be the prime target for airlines in terms of their most profitable passengers, but at some point will be,” highlights Rothman. The benefits also come with potential challenges. “If content service providers and
airlines selectively use this data as a negotiating tactic with distributors then I think there are going to be some issues,” states Rothman. “However, if the industry can come together in full transparency, then of course we’ll be impacted, but we’ll be able to come up with appropriate licensing models.”
Spafax offers video from Refinery29, which produces content about style, politics, food, sex, health, wellness, travel and beauty.
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Delta Air Lines has exclusive distribution rights for the Goop podcast, from the luxury lifestyle blog-turned-empire built by Gwyneth Paltrow.
American Airlines offers audio and visual relaxation exercises through its partnership with the Calm app, available on seatback and personal devices.
PHOTO: UNSPLASH, SUHYEON CHOI
NATIVE DIGITAL CONTENT
AirAsia and Vice Spice Up Destination Content for Millennials
PHOTO: AIRASIA ILLUSTRATIONS: GERTRUDIS SHAW
What do you get when heavy metal music, painfully spicy Indian food and a cool, millennial-leaning budget carrier collide? Synergy, it seems.
“Tears are literally AirAsia crewmembers running down my welcoming Utomo face,” lead vocalist of on board or a map Australian metal punk delineating her band High Tension’s trajectory with a Karina Utomo says, branded aircraft icon. after taking a bite of momo, a dumpling, doused “We wanted to be part of her journey,” Khaw in ghost pepper sauce. She’s in Bangalore, for explains. “If it was something that seemed too a four-part Vice Australia miniseries titled hard sell … it wouldn’t work. It would be too Hot Heads, the result of a content partnership random; it needed to flow naturally.” with Malaysian low-cost-carrier AirAsia. But airlines steering clear of in-your-face “India was an important branding risk promoting the destination for us because our destination at the expense of “It’s one of the first Australian customers could fly their own brand, so much so that times we have a from, say, Sydney, Melbourne viewers finish watching a video content partnership or Perth to Kuala Lumpur, and without even realizing an airline then on to India through our that brought this many played a part. “That’s a mistake a Fly-Thru connecting flight eyeballs to our airline.” lot of airlines are making. And with program,” says Rudy Khaw, head destination content, you’re giving RUDY KHAW, AIRASIA GROUP of Branding, AirAsia Group. your competitors an opportunity to With a risk-taking millennial tap into that,” Khaw notes. host, informal – sometimes bleeped profanities With Vice, AirAsia was able to carve out a slice – and documentary-style filmography, Hot Heads in the middle, where brand integration works for is replete with many of the hallmarks of a classic all parties – especially the discerning millennial Vice Media production. And that’s by design, consumer, Khaw says. “It’s one of the first times Khaw says. “We didn’t want to change the type we have a content partnership that brought of content that people go to Vice for.” this many eyeballs to our airline.” And with the There were some guidelines to determine current popularity of culinary travel among how the AirAsia brand would be integrated the cohort, the airline has surely left many into the footage: sparingly. Examples include hungry for more.
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Who Needs a CSP? CSPs are embracing new and diverging technologies to keep pace with consumer tendencies and ensure they don’t get squeezed out. Content service providers (CSPs) were at their height when airlines realized they were going to struggle to deliver content to an assortment of in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems across large aircraft fleets. As the IFE industry expanded, CSPs opened labs, invested in equipment and built teams of experts to source content from all over the world. By working with brands and advertisers, they also found ways to monetize and offset costs, bringing added value to airlines and studios. But can CSPs stay relevant in an era where advertisers are looking for more than pre-roll placement, YouTubers have more followers than Hollywood A-listers and in-flight connectivity is opening the door for content streaming platforms? If CSPs want to stay atop of their game, they’ll have to overcome the following challenges. CHALLENGE #1: COMPLEXITY As content libraries grow, the business of sourcing, screening and curating entertainment programs, plus negotiating their price and rights, has added further complexity to the IFE delivery process. “Our role is the most complex it has ever been. Airlines look to CSPs to drill down into the process to see if improvements can be made,” says Henry Gummer, vice-president of Entertainment, Spafax. “While we manage extraordinary complexity on an ongoing basis, we cannot expect airlines to continue to fund that without showing we are fully invested in reducing that complexity.”
“Our role is the most complex it has ever been. Airlines look to CSPs to drill down into the process to see if improvements can be made.” HENRY GUMMER, SPAFAX
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Kate Groth, vice-president of Content and Client Services at West Entertainment, agrees. “The CSP today invests a lot of time into operational metadata and integration logistics,” she says. “[Applying] multiple software updates [under] tight deadlines and working across all our partners requires the utmost attention to detail.” Automation is the holy grail to undoing that complexity: Spafax held a hackathon last year to investigate how artificial intelligence could help tag and categorize content, or even flag issues for editing, such as controversial images or explicit language. And West Entertainment developed WE by West, a platform that gives airlines greater control with the ability to keep track of titles, status of deliverables and invoicing.
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Read the full story: apex.aero/csp-future
“Airlines don’t buy hardware, they buy a service, and the hardware is a means to that end.”
ILLUSTRATIONS: ROMUALDO FAURA
JOHN WHITE, INFLIGHT DUBLIN
CHALLENGE #2: CONNECTIVITY Airlines investing in Wi-Fi may choose to forgo IFE or leave passengers to entertain themselves on their own devices, but CSPs say they can add value to the connected IFE experience. Gummer believes CSPs will be instrumental in making the in-flight Wi-Fi model feasible, from introducing new brand alliances to subsidizing in-flight connectivity to possibly reducing data consumption with cached content. “Understandably, many airlines are focused on delivering [connectivity] without concentrating on how it can improve the experience for customers,” he says. “Who better to turn to than a CSP to come up with new ways to best drive engagement from an audience they’ve been entertaining for years? We know the content landscape better than anyone else and we’re well-versed in driving brand partnerships, which will be key to this new model.” Duncan Abell, Global Eagle’s vice-president of Creative, also isn’t convinced content streaming platforms will be able to make a proposition robust enough, or tailored enough, for discerning airlines. “Once the spike goes, the airlines will probably come back and say, ‘Can I have the widest curation of the best content available?’ And find themselves back in the same position of needing what we provide.”
Global Eagle launched its Airconnect Go portable solution, supported by hardware from Astronics, last year. The product offers “mini-premium” options, whereby customers can subscribe to a content package and select additional local content. “We are probably not going to get into embedded seats or compete with Thales and Panasonic, but you’ll see us expanding toward more wireless IFE products,” says Michael Pigott, senior vice-president of Product and Engineering, Global Eagle. Hardware from Astronics also forms the backbone of Inflight Dublin’s Everhub offering, but the company is also looking ahead to develop software that will continue to evolve with the industry. “Airlines don’t buy hardware, they buy a service, and the hardware is a means to that end,” says CEO John White. “Hardware is becoming commoditized with the cost of servers and WAPs [wireless access points] and everything else dropping. We’re in the service business; we look to enhance the passenger experience and add more potential revenue channels for all the stakeholders.”
CHALLENGE #3: DARK FLIGHTS Due to the high costs of implementing seatback screens, smaller airlines haven’t traditionally considered IFE, and that’s why many CSPs are partnering with hardware manufacturers to offer lower-cost, turnkey solutions.
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Coded Caching Streamlines Multipassenger Viewing Experience Cadami is giving airlines a way to cater to passengers’ appetite for entertainment – without the lag.
Coded caching can reduce an airline’s bandwidth usage by between 50 and 80 percent.
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SLEEPER HIT
Coded caching was created 30 years ago, but until people started accessing VOD services on different mobile devices, there wasn’t really a use case for it, hence the commercial delay. combined and transmitted over the network. They are decoded together with the cache at each passenger’s seat to unlock a following segment of the film or TV show they are watching. “Passenger one and passenger two would receive the same chunk sent over the network, but once combined with the ones in their own cache, they’d each receive a different piece of content,” Kuehn explains, adding that Cadami’s software can perform up to thousands of these transmissions every second. So while traditional IFE systems can stream between 2,000 and 3,000 movies to approximately 200 users at a time, with Cadami’s coded caching solution, airlines can provide the same to over 500 users – Kuehn calls it “pure mathematics.”
ILLUSTRATION: JORGE DE LA PAZ
Remember the scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Mike Teavee is “sent by television”? He is teleported, whizzing around above his father’s head in millions of tiny pieces before being put back together to appear as a miniature version of himself on screen. Coded caching isn’t much different, and it comes with big benefits for airlines. According to Thomas Kuehn, co-founder of Munichbased company Cadami, which commercialized the technology in the in-flight entertainment (IFE) space, coded caching can reduce an airline’s bandwidth usage by between 50 and 80 percent. It works by systematically storing content in tiny chunks – between a kilobyte and a few megabytes – at each seatback system throughout the cabin. Depending on who’s watching what, parcels of content are intelligently
Adaptive Deploys AI to Catch Explicit Images
PHOTO: ADAPTIVE
Image recognition could censor content in magazines and newspapers that some passengers might find offensive. Access to content, images and information is not the same around the world: China bans certain words and images that potentially criticize the government, France shuns commercial photos of airbrushed bodies; and much of the Middle East cracks down on images of people it deems indecently dressed. Similar rules apply in the inflight entertainment (IFE) world, requiring content service providers (CSPs) to scan movies, TV shows, documentaries, digital newspapers and magazines thoroughly to ensure they comply with specific guidelines set by their individual airline clients. “The airline would call us up and say, ‘This edition of Vogue features too much nudity, or this ad is too provocative’ and they would ask us to remove the publication altogether,” says Louis-Francois Lapointe, former product manager at Global Eagle, now VP of Product at Adaptive. “After it happened a couple of times, they asked us if we had any automated way of reviewing the content.” In 2016, the answer to that question was “No.” The only solution at the time was to assign a human to flag any images that might be considered risqué. Now, in 2019, Lapointe says the technology to automate this task is finally available. “Cloud service providers Google, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services are some of the biggest players in artificial intelligence (AI), and one of the things they offer
is image recognition. We built our automated content moderation tool on top of that,” Lapointe says. As the AI engine analyzes a publication, page by page, it returns a list of tags such as “legs,” “swimsuit,” or “skin,” for example, with a percentage next to each to show how certain it is the image contains said material. An airline can then adjust the threshold using a slider tool to extract the pages with the most explicit images, which will then be replaced by a blank page to let the reader know that certain content has been redacted. If desired, this process can be fully automated, but Lapointe explains there will be a learning period for the AI to familiarize itself with the user’s preferences. Asked whether the tool could be applied to video content, Lapointe says the technology has not reached the point where it can do that effectively. “It has shown promising results,” Lapointe says of external trials, “but the problem is that there can be penalties if you miss something. So it kind of defies the purpose if you have the AI do it and you still need a human go over all the movies to catch what has not been caught.” Censorship is, of course, a controversial and highly subjective matter. The current use of the tool is for a certain audience, Lapointe says. “In the west, we may not see these images as being problematic, but some airlines do, and we’re here to serve them.”
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A New Player Will gaming content bring in-flight entertainment to the next level?
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Entertainment (SLE), an offshoot of two-year-old private equity investment firm Signal Lamp Partners (the brainchild of David Villarreal and Jerry Dietrick). Together, SLE and Blizzard aim to bring “epic” content experiences to the skies. At the helm of SLE is Neil James, the company’s chief commercial officer, who, having worked in the in-flight entertainment (IFE) industry for 25 years, claims airlines are only now beginning to see how valuable the gaming community could be and how much it aligns with their own demographic. “Game publishers, like Blizzard, have great content and airlines
60% of esports fans are willing to travel to see their favorite games, tournaments and players. That number jumps to 67% for those with a household income of $50K to $99K, and to 72% for those earning $100K or more. Source: Mindshare North America
Over 40,000 members of the gaming community gathered for BlizzCon 2018.
PHOTOS: BLIZZCON
Blizzard Entertainment loyalists know all too well the value of a timely alliance: In Battle for Azeroth, they venture to distant lands to recruit new allies; in Overwatch, they combine characters’ unique abilities to devise fail-safe defense strategies; and at BlizzCon, they join (on-site or via an online stream) by the millions – 12 million, to be exact – to share in two intense days of spectatorship, community art and all out geekery. Last BlizzCon saw the development of another such pairing, between Blizzard Entertainment and newly formed Signal Lamp
Read the full story: apex.aero/state-of-play
have passengers who want it, but there’s been no clear or easy path to overcome our industry’s barriers and connect the two until now,” he says. These obstacles, according to James, include an overly complex supply chain leading to protracted 90-day content cycles and the struggle to deliver monetization – SLE plans to take on both. Drawing on its parent company’s previous investments in content delivery for the medical field, it has developed Seven Seas, a cloudbased solution that purportedly moves content from origin to end user in minutes across mixed fleets, with auto encoding, real-time content selection and near-instantaneous uploads. With the addition of its agnostic ad-serving solution
Ad Republic, SLE claims packaging that content with advertising, brand sponsorships and other e-commerce opportunities will be seamless, thereby addressing the second impediment. James envisages airlines using the technology to provide immersive experiences that give way to multiple entry points: cinematic shorts, live streams of esports events and gaming conventions, progamer and developer profiles, educational content, gameplay and more. “The holistic element is so important because not everyone’s a hardcore gamer,” he says. “Some people need to be eased into it.”
At the time of writing, SLE has yet to announce an airline partner, but, says it’s only a matter of time that airlines tune into the gaming community, which, according to Newzoo, comprised more than 2.3 billion active members that generated an estimated $137.9 billion in 2018. “Gaming and esports, as forms of entertainment, already have a seat at the table, but over the next five to 10 years that voice will only get stronger,” Villarreal says. James agrees, adding, “People will be looking forward to World of Warcraft ads, not Super Bowl ads – and they’ll be watching them in flight.”
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Watch and Learn A new breed of language-learning apps is turning your favorite show or movie into an educational tool. Can it make passengers’ time in flight more productive, too?
The airline cabin is an unexpectedly conducive environment for studying a foreign language: Passengers can’t get up and leave, and there’s the added motivation of arriving in a country where you can’t speak the language. After all, what better incentive is there for practicing your Italian verbs than the prospect of touching down in Rome in just a few hours and being able to order “un piatto di gnocchi al pomodoro fresco, per favore.”
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Singapore Airlines was among the first to take note of the suitability of language learning in the skies, when it worked Berlitz’s material into its KrisWorld in-flight entertainment (IFE) system in 2005. In 2017, British startup uTalk boarded Emirates and easyJet – a great idea, according to Richard Howeson, chairman of the language-learning company. “With very little effort, passengers can learn enough
to order their first drinks or negotiate transport, all by the time their plane lands,” he said at the time. Wireless IFE provider Immfly, which has also offered uTalk on its platform, has had “excellent take-up rates and engagement” with language learning programs, says Maria Girão, Immfly’s marketing and communications manager. “Providing a relevant offering matching the customer demographic, with a good
“Matching the customer demographic with a good range of languages is a fundamental proposition.”
ILLUSTRATION: BÁRBARA MALAGOLI
MARIA GIRÃO, IMMFLY
range of languages and broad coverage of fluency levels, [is an element that’s] fundamental to such a proposition,” she adds. Narrative video is emerging as a medium for language learning, as demonstrated by Rakuten-owned streaming service Viki, which is a sort of mix between Hulu and Wikipedia – its name is a play on “video” and “wiki.” It streams a library of licensed content that viewer-volunteers can then subtitle themselves and re-add to the platform’s ever-growing library. Movie enthusiasts from all over the world have been translating the subtitles of their favorite foreign films into their own languages (think: an anime subtitled by a Greek fan or a telenovela subtitled by a Chinese viewer). Using Viki’s Learn Mode, viewers can
Top of the Class Duolingo, an app that promotes language learning through practice a few minutes a day, struggled to keep its users when it first launched. According to Bloomberg, the developer set out to make its courses as addictive as slaying a Candy Crush level and saw next-day retention bump up from 13 percent in 2012 to 55 percent in 2018. Here are the app’s most popular courses:
1. English for Spanish speakers 2. Spanish for English speakers 3. French for English speakers 4. English for Portuguese speakers 5. German for English speakers Source: Bloomberg/Duolingo
watch a film with both nativelanguage subtitles and originallanguage subtitles at once. While Viki hasn’t found its way on board aircraft just yet, Immfly’s ongoing collaboration with Rakuten (from which it has procured content for easyJet and Pegasus Airlines) means it can’t be ruled out. “Immfly has already facilitated the provision of services such as Rakuten TV, Rakuten Kobo, Rakuten Viber and Rakuten Games, and plans on expanding the collaboration with additional Rakuten services,” Girão says. As video technology gets more sophisticated, the door is open for deeper languagelearning experiences in the cabin, should an airline deem it worthwhile from a passenger experience perspective. “The key to unlocking the potential is reliant on providing a relevant user experience, adapted to the onboard environment,” Girão says. “Irrespective of the device used, however, the opportunity to brush up or learn the basics enriches the travel experience – even the most rudimentary words in a foreign country can be of crucial help.”
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Choose-Your-Own Advertising
Anyone who ever cracked open a Choose Your Own Adventure book can tell you that shaping the direction a story takes as it’s unfolding can be downright exhilarating. And when that story comes to life on screen with real actors, glossy production values and sizzle to spare, well, seriously, what’s not to love? The popularity of interactive series like Netflix’s cult smash Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and HBO’s Mosaic have only deepened our love affair with choose-your-own-adventure storytelling. But one can’t help feeling that we’ve barely scratched the surface here. Especially on the advertising front, where consumers now have the ability to interact with ad campaigns, by shopping directly from a “suggested” social media post, for example. On Bandersnatch, The Verge writes that Netflix is able to gather data on users’ decision-making processes and glean insights that traditional media cannot provide. This type of data could help advertisers tap into a crucial moment in purchase behavior – to buy or not to buy. “The ability to provide the right experience in the right context ... when natively integrated into the experience, or even providing the experience itself, is always far more accepted, and effective, than any intrusive and/or inopportune ad,” says Cyril Jean, CEO and co-founder of PXCom.
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Real-time analytics can offer a more precise understanding of the targeted audience’s appetite, adds Jean-Marc Chevassus, CEO of Inflight Media Digital. But only detailed reporting figures will be effective in measuring a campaign’s success. “Brands have to develop their notoriety with a suitable media plan and several touch points to reach their target audience,” he says. Tim Letheren, co-founder and director at Inadvia seems to agree. “Obviously it is really important to first get the basics right – addressable, measurable advertising that can be updated on a very regular basis. [But] from a branding, sampling and direct response perspective ... it can only be a good thing for advertisers to get consumers to interact and immerse themselves with their brand ... and it is something we are seeing more and more.” And while Letheren freely admits that some interactive advertising can be a bit “gimmicky” at times, he says that the ability to interact with a brand in real-time is still hugely impactful. “This coupled with the ability to go direct to purchase from a video is powerful. So, only time will tell whether this is a passing fad. What is clear is that airlines should want to serve relevant advertising to passengers in the air as it both improves the experience and increases ancillary revenue.”
PHOTOS: NETFLIX
Interactive storytelling is keeping viewers and advertisers engaged.
ART Art Director
ADVERTISING Portfolio Director
EDITORIAL Director
Graphic Designer
steve.oconnor@apexmedia.aero +44 207 906 2077
maryann.simson@apexmedia.aero
CONTRIBUTORS
Publisher
AL ST. GERMAIN
al.stgermain@spafax.com
MARYANN SIMSON
Managing Editor CAROLINE KU
caroline.ku@apexmedia.aero
Deputy Editor VALERIE SILVA
valerie.silva@apexmedia.aero
Digital Editor
KRISTINA VELAN
kristina.velan@apexmedia.aero
News Editor ARI MAGNUSSON
ari.magnusson@apexmedia.aero
Contributor and Special Projects Manager STEPHANIE TAYLOR
ILLUSTRATION: FELIPE VARGAS
stephanie.taylor@apexmedia.aero
NICOLÁS VENTURELLI
ANGÉLICA GEISSE
JORGE DE LA PAZ, ROMUALDO FAURA, BÁRBARA MALAGOLI, TOMÁS ROMERO, GERTRUDIS SHAW, MATHIAS SIELFELD, FELIPE VARGAS, JORDAN YERMAN
PRODUCTION Director of Project Delivery ALAIN BRIARD
Production Manager
STEVE O’CONNOR
Ad Production Manager MARY SHAW
mary.shaw@spafax.com
Ad Production Coordinator JOANNA FORBES
joanna.forbes@apexmedia.aero
Bookmark Content and Communications A Spafax Group Company CEO, Bookmark
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