Singapore, APEX EXPO | October 25, 2016–
PXCom officially launches its Digital Inflight Ad-Serving solution called AirSAS at APEX EXPO 2016, and unveils the first KPIs
AirSAS enables brands to roll out their digital campaign throughout the IFE, without any required connectivity or bandwidth consumption, disrupting in- flight legacy advertising.

Until now, brands who wanted to reach the traveller during their flight had only the choice between paper inflight mag, global pre-roll videos, stickers… Whilst traditional advertising budgets are continuously tightening, digital budgets remain on a fast growing trend.
PXCom and its media sales partner, IMM International, decided to bring to the air industry an effective tool enabling airlines to tap into this growing gold mine, creating AirSAS.

The ultimate inflight digital ad-serving solution
Designed for both seatback screens and w-IFE, AirSAS is formed of several software modules: a back-office cloud suite, a dedicated IFE ad-server, and a reporting module.

The back-office encompasses campaigns management for both brands (from creation to reports edition), and airlines (enabling advertisers selection as well as self-promotion). Once created, the digital campaigns are either sent to PXCom’s IFE ad-serving module or to other connected IFE ad-servers developed by the IFE manufacturers themselves. The upload operation is conducted when the aircraft are on the ground. During the flight the ad-server rolls out the campaigns according to their management rules, and the gathered data are offloaded once the aircraft are back on the ground. Then the reporting module aggregates all the gathered data in order to update the campaigns.

“AirSAS offers the state-of-the-art features that can be found on the most accurate web/mobile ad-servers, enabling full targeting and rules management capabilities”, says Cyril JEAN, PXCom’s CEO. “However, some IFE systems already offer some digital advertising opportunities, even if they are not comprehensive. Since we are platform agnostic, in such case, we recommend to proceed step by step, and connect our back office as a good starting point. Then, on a second step, we can schedule a full integration of AirSAS into the IFE. Our ultimate goal is to enable brands to target passengers and no longer airlines. This involves a great shift of mind from the industry!”

First results and live update
Prior to launch AirSAS officially, PXCom has conducted some tests within its interactive destination guides for IFEC, measuring all the relevant KPIs, among them:

• An average of 23% of w-IFE users go to Destination Guides section
• 89% spend more than 11 minutes on a destination guide
• 16 minutes of average browsing time for a 2-hour flight / 28 minutes for a 4-hour flight.
• Top 3 sections are: Do&See (37%), Bars & Nightlife (14%), Restaurants (13%)
  (Full results will be available online during the expo).

Full AirSAS solution is currently onboarding on its first airlines, with operational live report which updates the results between every 3 and 24 hours according to the considered airline and flight length. Stay tuned!

“The loop is now seamless and fully operational”, comments Cyril JEAN. “With a growing number of advertisers, the next step for AirSAS is the yield management feature, enabling automatic selection of the most profitable campaigns. With such a qualified audience, airline industry can easily avoid the digital pitfalls that has been digged by the real time biding (RTB) on the web & mobile.”

PXCom exhibits on #1120 at APEX Expo 2016.