NEW YORK — United Airlines in June unveiled Kinective Media, billed as the airline industry’s first media network. Drawing insights and data from 110 million travelers and 40 million MileagePlus frequent flyers, the offering quickly partnered with brands including Norwegian Cruise Line, Macy’s, Chase United Co-Brand Credit Cards and more.
Mike Petrella was hired as managing director of strategic partnerships in September 2023 and has served as a key leader in the development of Kinective Media. Previously, the executive spent 23 years in the same corporate ecosystem, from being the third employee at Advertising.com through acquisitions by AOL and Yahoo. Petrella was “amazed” at how dynamic United was expanding into a white space area as a nearly 100-year-old company.
“I thought I was coming into an old school environment, but even our CEO is very forward thinking,” Petrella said. “The way he communicates to his leadership team is very ‘fail first, fail fast, fail forward,’ and I wasn’t expecting that.”
Marketing Dive spoke with Petrella between sessions at Advertising Week New York about the lessons he learned from helping stand up a media offering, the need for data privacy legislation and where the media landscape goes from here.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: You said in a panel that you launched a multimillion dollar business in nine months and your first audience extension campaign three and a half months to the day you started. What does it take to go to market that quickly?
MIKE PETRELLA: You need buy-in from everyone and I think that was the thing that was most impressive to me with the team. There was a willingness to be educated and influenced.
One of my friends gave me the best advice: You may not know all the answers, but you know the questions to ask. You have to educate yourself in terms of the other building blocks. So from a data perspective, where is our data set today, where do we want it to go tomorrow? As we build a sales organization, how do we build in such a manner that is conducive and complementary to what we’ve stood up ahead of their presence?
We were smart in terms of the choices we made, because it allowed us to be dynamic and fluid. We didn’t get locked into anything, and that was the key. In this industry, everything changes and nothing changes all at once, but you have to be able to pivot quickly.
How did you approach building the team?
We didn’t bring in one airline person for ad tech, which is good and bad. As we build this business, there are nuances with this industry relative to others — “Here’s why this button is red and this button is blue” — but we brought in the right people. We brought in senior people as well. We built from the top down versus the bottom up, and in doing so, you could get things moving on a very senior level. Contacts, networking and just overall industry knowledge really helped us drive that forward at an expeditious rate.
Quick scale is the hard part. It’s not a plug and play, where, now that you have data, you make billions of dollars. It’s setting it up the right way to scale and protect our customers.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. We could have done this very differently and just went out and made our data available everywhere. There are risks, there are bad actors, there’s compliance. You can make a billion dollars real quick. But is that sustainable? No.
Speaking of compliance, what do you think of the data privacy landscape?
I want federal legislation so badly. I think we all do. There’s [about 20 state] laws today. So we’re compliant in that sense, but it’s like Whac-a-Mole.
We actually have a team in D.C. right by the White House… they provided a lot of perspective that I did not understand from the government's perspective on what we should be doing and how we should be doing it. The more we partner with them, the better off we’ll be in terms of being on the forefront, but I’m asking for that legislation: Give me it, let us be the poster child of what’s to happen.
You’ve spoken about creating an in-flight “living room experience.” When it comes to media, is there a meaningful distinction between endemic and non-endemic advertisers?
Honestly, there’s not. Even besides the living room experience, we’re building these profiles based on intelligence and insights we extract from 110 million travelers and 40 million MileagePlus folks. You are who you are, whether you fly to a destination or come home.
I think it’s more about that personalization, where it becomes complimentary, not creepy: “Welcome to the United lounge. Did you get that rash checked out?” No! We know you’re a foodie or we know you’re a Mets fan, whatever the case is.
Netflix does the best job of it: “Here’s what we think you’d like based on what you’ve watched.” Well, I have many more signals, not just what you watched, but what you bought, how you acted, where you stayed. How about I put that in front of you? It’s that immersion and personalization of the journey, because travel’s a hassle when it comes down to it. How can I take the hassle out of that? How can I make it a little bit easier?
With increasing fragmentation in the media network space, what’s your pitch to advertisers?
There has to be some cleaning up of this industry. It is way too fragmented, marketers have way too many choices and everyone [says they’ve] got the best data in the world.
If we can prove our value, and we can prove it in such a manner that it checks off multiple boxes, not just I checked off my commerce media box, but rather, I’m able to, on a true omnichannel basis, see, track and measure the experience — that’s valuable.
We’re doing what no one’s done before, the first airline to market. If a brand comes back and says, “That really worked” — and we’re getting that, we have the renewals from our launch partners — it’s just a matter of the virility of success being true, especially within an agency. One buyer or planner finds out, and like that “Brady Bunch” screen, it goes from like eight to 18 [people]. I think that’s going to be the impact, but we have to get it right at the very start. You only get one test sometimes.
How will the convergence of commerce media and connected TV play out in Kinective?
[We have] a shoppable experience today on our screens — it’s not really true CTV, because it’s not being loaded in real time — but you can buy concert tickets on your routes to Vegas. You can purchase or get information about Macallan or Bottega Veneta.
[Ad-supported video on demand] is gonna be far more attractive to us, but the data in itself, coupled with the media, allows you to hit that branding message and that shoppable transaction message, whether it’s click the screen [or not].
I think it’s more just focused on the individual. Where do they spend their time? Where are they watching? Are they streaming? Are they on an app? Whatever the case is, how do we complement the experience? That’s the consumer side.
The marketer side is yet another platform to measure that we can’t measure today. I’m sure there’s six panels today on CTV measurement and lack thereof. That needs to be solved. I’d like to be one of the first that brings that omnichannel measurement solution into play.
There’s not a silver bullet. There’s a number of brands that have multiple partners, one of them has 12. That’s a lot of contracts. It’s not easy.
Are the trade bodies and industry groups helping on that?
The IAB is doing their best to get there, and I want to be part of the solution. It’s easy for me to sit here and complain, but at the end of the day, I really want to drive to some type of answer, and I’m not sure what it is yet. Let’s work together to test and figure out how to distill all the information into one means, and if you have uniformity in terms of standards, metrics, whatever else, that makes it a lot easier.
