“This is an opportunity where audiences can’t swipe past it, you connect with them in a way that you have their focus, you have their attention,” said Chris Demange, vp of monetization and commercial aviation business at Viasat Ads. “To be able to associate your brand with not only the right audience, but the right frame of mind for the audience — it’s a super unique opportunity.”

The opportunity is untapped in the sense that brands don’t often consider destination marketing as a year-round piece of their ad strategies. But the brands that think about destination marketing similarly to how they view contextual advertising and utilize destination marketing as part of their ad strategies to its fullest potential are the ones that can truly reach the audiences they’re looking to talk to — and without competition from rival brands.

“If you’re a brand, and you are trying to connect with a passenger, how better to do it in this crowded market space than when they’re in flight and they are sitting there, and you have attention primacy like you don’t have elsewhere?” Demange said.

Tapping destination marketing as a way to reach the right audiences — who will actually listen

In 2024, the Transportation Security Administration predicted that the agency would screen 18.3 million travelers from the Tuesday before Thanksgiving Day through the Monday after. And from Dec. 19, 2024, through Jan. 2 of this year, the TSA expected to screen nearly 40 million travelers. Both numbers represent a 6% increase over 2023, making it reasonable that these numbers will increase even further this year.

That’s millions of consumers who represent an engaged, captive audience for the brands that make the investments to get in front of them during their travel. And that’s just during one part of the year.

Not only does destination marketing provide the opportunity for brands to market to captive audiences, but with modern destination marketing, brands can also target their campaigns to the audiences that are most relevant to them.

“It’s very contextual. It’s contextual in a way that you couldn’t do before. No other ads can do that,” Demange said. “Nowhere else do I see that happening.”

One example he gave is a B2B brand targeting flights heading to the location of Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference. Another is a clothing brand that would have the option of marketing to travelers heading to Florida very differently from those flying to New York or Los Angeles. Or a brand that wants to connect with football fans, advertising on flights whose destination is the city hosting the Super Bowl.

“You’ll have a consumer brand that is now adjacent to that big event, and there’s some correlation that’s happening in [the traveler’s] mind,” Demange said. “It’s just a subtle connection there that is part of their emotional response.”

The year-round ad opportunity of destination marketing — and its place as the future of contextual

For brand marketers to get the most out of destination marketing, they have to think beyond just the holiday travel season. Last year, 876 million passengers traveled by air, according to the International Air Transport Association. And more than 3 million passengers fly every day in and out of U.S. airports, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

This makes destination marketing an important tool for brands’ year-round advertising strategies. Through platforms like Viasat Ads, destination marketing in its modern form has the legs to stand on as a key piece of brands’ marketing mixes.

“There is a value in the context and the emotional attention that you get from the way that Viasat Ads supports destination marketing that you’re not going to get from other channels,” Demange said.

Specifically, he said destination marketing lends itself best to the brand lift and awareness part of a brand’s marketing mix. Brands are already spending on performance-based marketing and using customer profiles built on analytics to target their campaigns.

“And, by the way, so is everybody else, right?” Demange said. “Everybody is chasing that same customer in the same way, using those analytics.”

That’s where destination marketing comes in, because it’s actually effective at achieving that other brand lift piece of the marketing strategy.

“In-flight and at travel destinations are very good ways of doing that, and that’s unique in the marketplace,” Demange added. “You don’t want to get consumers when they’re in the wild. It’s too hard. It’s too much noise pollution. There are too many other people competing for that same avenue to reach those eyeballs.”

Another important consideration about destination marketing, he pointed out, is that, in its modern form, the “dead zone” historically associated with in-flight advertising has been eliminated. Previously, brands utilizing travel-based advertising channels could connect with travelers before they got on a plane and after they got off, but the in-flight period was completely offline. Now, brands can extend the reach of destination marketing campaigns to encompass a traveler’s full journey.

And the travelers who are being targeted when they’re in-flight have a different frame of mind than other consumers, Demange explained. It’s this piece of destination marketing that makes it an important part of where contextual advertising is going next.

“We know where [travelers are] heading to. We know where they’re heading from. We know the big events that are going on in that particular destination,” he said. “This is a unique way of reaching people at a time when there’s no other opportunity in the industry right now that allows you to do that.”

People “do things differently in flight,” he added. “They’re more open, I think, than they are otherwise [outside of travel environments].”

Destination marketing also has the potential to deliver brands data-driven insights that allow them to quantify the value of advertising in that channel. Viasat Ads, for example, provides analytics to help brands maximize their ad engagement, message optimization and ROI.

“What we have is the capability of real time,” Demange said. “That’s what’s unique, this is real-time advertising. It’s the best of what happens out in the open internet now happens in flight.”

Partner insights from Viasat Ads