Is Massive Airline Co-Branding The Next Source Of Revenues?

While multi-branding is not new to airliners (Alaska, Southwest, and others), we stumbled across this story on the net that is certainly one of the few to feature snack foods. The advertising agency that developed the concept, Luckie Strategic PR, told us that the aircraft branding and the Little Debbie Great American Getaway contest (on AirTran) were a natural. They even thought of giving away tiny Little Debbie cupcakes to passengers. The message here is: Be prepared for more logo/image dilution as airlines seek to generate more on the bottom line. For years, the airline has fiercely protected their airline ‘visual’ territory, specifically inside and outside the aircraft. This includes IFE re-branding. The Little Debbie co-branding could be the beginning of a paradigm shift and the real indicator will be when we see it inside the aircraft itself. Here is a bit more about the promotion: Little Debbie web site and news release.

A road warrior sent IFExpress this connectivity report: “Flying Dallas to Seattle last night, I used Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi on American Airlines.  From past experience, the service is reasonably good.  Two things struck me last night as I used it: 1) After you log into your account and pay for the session, you are then required to enter a Captcha code…..this was annoying and 2) Internet speed was almost unusably slow. I ran a few typical Internet speed tests and concluded the problem was unusually long latency times of 250ms – 500ms (10-20x slower than my internet connection at home).” (Editor’s Note: A Captcha code is one of those skewed letter/number interpretations that users must decipher to verify that data is being entered or retrieved by a real person. This can only be a sign that hackers, spammers and/or email data miners are hitting on inflight connectivity.)

The convergence of social media and airline stumbling hath wrought the following: With no “wide-body” solutions in sight, we remind our readers of the power of social media because Kevin Smith carried his rant publically via Twitter. Southwest really got gored on this one and we see that any service business must pay attention to the Blogs, Tweets, Buzz, and all other matter of social commentary. Why? Because people are listening and searching on the Internet and IFExpress will be there too. Seattle P-I Story

We hoped to bring you a review of a revolutionary connectivity product in this issue but we got so excited about using it that we wanted to test it more. Next issue – stay tuned!