American Airlines soars with programmatic OOH

Navigating the ever-changing skies

Adapting to fluctuating consumer travel behaviors, American Airlines focused on promoting its Mastercard-linked AAdvantage Loyalty Program. The aim was to educate and incentivize members to utilize the co-branded card, thereby enriching their travel experience with various rewards.
 
Morgan Collins from EssenceMediacom shares, “We've been tasked with shifting away from lower funnel conversion tactics that we were heavily invested in during the pandemic. And now we've taken the opportunity to shift away from that and really meet the consumers where demand is and where we've seen in the category that it needs to grow, which is loyalty.”

Crafting a journey with every ad

American Airlines strategically selected a variety of DOOH venues to ensure message resonance throughout the consumer journey. The creative team developed concise, engaging DOOH creatives with QR codes for deeper engagement, tailored to
each unique environment.

Adrian Witter from Kinetic explains, “In some cases, we need to be very bold and very purposeful with the messaging that we put out, and then when it comes to some of the other formats, the contextual relevance can really catapult the performance into the stratosphere.”

Integrating DOOH into a unified media strategy

American Airlines made DOOH a key element of its omnichannel media strategy, effectively complementing online and social channels to foster digital engagement.

Marty Peat from American Airlines comments, “We added digital out-of-home onto the plan last year because it was an opportunity not only to reach our [current] members but also to remind everybody that had the credit card in their pocket to use it and to take advantage of that moment to use it. And we've seen some really strong results
come out of that.”

Measuring success in the skies

A brand study was conducted to assess the impact of the DOOH campaign on the AAdvantage Program. Marty Peat ads:

"From the activity we ran in Q4 without giving away all the secrets we saw a 300:1 return on a couple of those metrics of new Advantage joins, COBRA and spend, but also flight purchase. So when you're presenting that at a senior level to say hey that's what this media can drive it's pretty hard to argue with, but data and being able to back it up is really key."

Marty Peat  |  Director, Global Marketing - Integrated Marketing Strategy American Airlines

A collaborative flight to success

The partnership of Vistar Media, EssenceMediacom, and Kinetic has established programmatic OOH as an integral media channel, driving growth and loyalty for American Airlines.