United Airlines Now Tracks Data on Millions of Passengers. Here’s What They Say About Taylor Swift

You might think it’s easy to find Taylor Swift fans. Swifties don’t really keep their status a secret, and even if they did, we could simply go to the numbers: 

• Millions of tickets sold to Swift’s Eras tour.
• More than $1 billion in total revenue. 
• More than 200 million records sold.

That’s why it’s interesting that when United Airlines officially launched its new Kinective Media by United Airlines product, allowing marketers to run personalized, digital ads to United passengers via onboard seatback screens and other placements, they wound up talking about “the Taylor Swift moment.” 

“We flew 165 million people in 2023. We’ve got in excess of 100 million unique IDs,” said Richard Nunn, CEO of United Airlines MileagePlus, and he gave the example of Swift fans flying to see her concerts as a group that advertisers could theoretically target on United fights:

I wrote here in May about the geographic arbitrage that many American fans are using, flying to Europe to see Swift and spending less on planes, hotels, and tickets than it would have cost to go to a Swift concert here at home.

Imagine as a marketer, being able to target those Swift fans the entire time they traveled: from before they boarded the plane, through the average 3.5 hours on board with a video screen less than two feet from their faces, and even once they land.

To be sure, this whole thing is brand new, and United isn’t facilitating a Swiftie-targeted campaign yet; Dunn was using her as an example. (United made this abundantly clear to me when I asked for more information afterward.)

But as I wrote recently, United says it tracks data on more than 100 million individual customers. And, Nunn offered quite a few examples of audiences and potential campaigns:

• Travel, of course, but also luxury automobiles, and personal finance — with a special emphasis on travelers in “front of the plane,” premium cabins, versus “back of the plane.”
• Consider a rideshare company: “Their most profitable routes are home to airport, airport to hotel, and back again. They don’t know when people are flying. We do.”
• Finally, the Taylor Swift-inspired one: “We all hear about the Taylor Swift moment. We generated a lot of money on the back of airline tickets last year, and that sort of popped up another use case, around events by destination. They know how many seats are available in Las Vegas; we’re flying a bunch of people to Las Vegas.”

It’s all part of what United thinks is a big advantage: “sequential marketing,” meaning that you can be targeted based on interests or other attributes for an average of six hours straight, including travel on both ends of a flight, and the flight itself — and especially leveraging the in-flight entertainment screens (IFEs) right in front of your seat.

Some observers raised an eyebrow last year when United hired Dunn as CEO of its frequent flyer program.

He’d had zero experience with airlines in the past, and he came to United Airlines having most recently worked at Comcast, where he “he built and led the Advertising Platform, a data-enabled audience technology which unified and powered their multi-billion-dollar advertising businesses.”

In retrospect (and I cknowledge that I didn’t catch this at the time), Dunn’s resume offered a smart clue about where United Airlines thought it might be headed, in terms of the future of its membership program.

No, I don’t think you’d have to go far to find passengers who aren’t thrilled about the idea of being marketed to and tracked during yet another activity in life. But, it almost seems inevitable at this point that some airline would have figured it out.

Swifites might be the example, but one way or the other, we’re all going to be the target.