Transcript

Bennie F Johnson

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into the conversations of individuals that flourish at the intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We hope to introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know.

Through our thought provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, my special guest is none other than Richard Nunn, Chief Executive Officer of United Airways Mileage Plus. Richard joined United to lead United Plus in May of 2023, with a focus on accelerating the growth of this core business and creating a new strategic commercial opportunity.

Richard brings more than two decades of experience in digital media and data expertise, building and scaling businesses globally while leading with media technology groups spanning the world. Before joining United, Richard was vice president and general manager of advertising technology for Comcast, where he built and led the advertising platform, a data-enabled audience technology which unified and powered their multi-billion dollar advertising business. Data, business and growth, all things that Richard knows really well. Richard, thanks for joining our podcast.

Richard Nunn

Thanks, Bennie. Nice to be here. Exciting.

Bennie 

It’s really exciting to have you here. I’ll skip into kind of your current world and we’ll talk a bit about the past and a few, but something that struck me earlier this year was the announcement of the new platform that you built for United. This kind of nexus of technology, advertising, and my experience sitting in planes.

Richard

Yes, yeah, no, it is exciting. Yes, I joined, as you said, back in May 23, with a brief really, to better understand the value of the data that the airline is sitting on. It’s one of the world’s largest loyalty programs, a lot of audiences. We flew 165 million people in 2023. So there’s a lot of data from that. And it was just joining all these dots.

I don’t come from an airline background. I don’t certainly don’t come from a loyalty background. And the opportunity at a macro level, which I’m sure you’re aware around, you’ve probably heard of these things with retail media networks, which have been stood up over the last three or four years. And that’s really been predicated on the so-called when Google will or won’t duplicate the cookie. And this big shift in terms of the value of first party data that major brands sit on and what we’ve seen in the kind of retail

Bennie

Right.

Richard

Perspective and it’s now blown out into kind of financial services and rideshares and now airlines and hotels, is this sort of plethora of these businesses being stood up based on the value of that first body data. And that really was the catalyst for us to take a look at what this, you know, the airline has. And the reality is we already had, albeit a relatively nascent media business, you you did see ads in the plane.

Bennie

Mm.

Richard 

The problem was it wasn’t the best experience. There was no frequency capping. You probably saw that ad 55 times. It wasn’t particularly targeted. So it wasn’t a great experience for the customer. It wasn’t certainly a great experience for the advertiser. And probably it felt like going back in time to some degree in these metal tubes in the sky. 

Bennie

Right. Right.

Richard

So bringing, I think, a lot of my own expertise from the ad tech and media world and really understanding the data launching connected media was a good natural progression as to how we’re looking at loyalty, how we’re looking at customers to personalize and make more relevant messages to our customer base. So that was the catalyst. So super exciting.

Bennie 

So when you first came in with this brief, not coming in from transportation or hospitality, what was the most shocking insight for you?

Richard 

I will never complain about an airline being late ever again.

Bennie 

Hahaha!

Richard 

It’s extraordinary. mean, I know when you think about it, of course, logically, you know, there’s a lot of things that go into an airline and, you know, getting through the airport, getting the food on the plane, all that stuff, and then taking it off and landing. And there’s, it’s a logistics business. And, you know, but the flip side is when you’re at the gate and it’s half an hour late, or, you know, there’s stuff that goes on, there’s a lot of frustration builds up, right. And now that I genuinely know what goes into getting an airline from A to B, it’s a very, very complex business. So that’s why that was the biggest insight for me that I wasn’t naive to it, but the depth of detail that sat behind it was just extraordinary. It’s an extraordinary business.

Bennie 

You’re right. It’s a different type of respect when you have that up close personal experience with it. To pivot on the personal, the most personal space you have when you fly is there at your seat. And so you’re able to, with upgrades in technology and upgrades in thought pattern here, really enter into this personal relationship with the customer. You talked about coming new to a loyalty business.

Richard

Yeah.

Bennie

And it feels like this program is like loyalty writ large, right? You know me, I’m here with you, I fly with you often, and now I’m entrusting you with my, what, three hours on average?

Richard 

Yep, three and a half hours of uninterrupted time. A lot.

Bennie

So it’s a lot, and it’s a lot of opportunity, but it’s also a lot of responsibility for you to kind of protect that space. When you thought about your first series of brand partners to work with, what was your calculus as to what brands would make sense to partner with, united in this very valuable space, right? These are your customers, you wrapped around them in this moment. What was the calculus in determining your brand partners?

Richard

It’s a great question because I refer back to the kind of those that retail media world that’s been stood up, you all the major retailers on that. The interesting thing just for context, and it does directly answer your question, is that that world in terms of retail, you go into a supermarket or a store, you’re going to buy one thing or several things within that store. So therefore you are locked in and we’ve seen this kind of in the vertical space of all things retail.

Now you kind of think, well, we’re an airline, you’re in the travel mindset, right? Let’s kind of just stay in the travel vertical. And we made an important and strategic decision. Yes, we’ll be in travel, but we also want to be in these other verticals as well. Retail, financial services, auto, luxury goods, so on and so forth. Because that key point that you just said, you have three and a half hours of sort of dwell time and we all do it.

Bennie

Mm.

Richard

You might be on a plane and you just, I’ve just flown in from Frankfurt this morning. I’ve spent literally seven and a half hours of the nine hour flight doing emails. Granted, I’ve just come away from on vacation, so there’s a bit of catching up to do. Or you might want to sit back and relax, or you might want to just do things through your list of chores, right? So I think we wanted to ensure that the breadth and depth of the partners that we launch with was very broad across those verticals and it was a great success. And that continues since we’ve launched because I think people are in just a different mindset and you can’t categorize them as they’re flying from A to B, they’re in a travel mindset. They’re traveling, but they’re not necessarily in a travel mindset.

Bennie

Did you see an increase in the brand creative? Did your partners come with a different set of tools than what they traditionally had in their maybe other media channels?

Richard

I think the answer to that is we’ve now opened up a bunch of channels and very addressable screens that are going to allow a lot of the creative agents to think quite differently. Based on the speed that we launched this thing, that wasn’t really the aptitude to do that initially. But I’ll give you a couple of examples which…

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Richard

Not necessarily in terms of classic creative, but in terms of creative thinking, how we’re thinking about stuff. So we had a moment last 2023, I was six to eight weeks into the role. And there’s a young lady called Taylor Swift, who was doing the Eras tour. 

Bennie 

Mm. We’ve heard of her a bit. just a little bit.

Richard

And some of our revenue management team, these the guys that do all our airline tickets and various worm charts and various data analytical. We did some sort of post analysis that we saw various spikes in the cities that she was having concerts at. So people were flying specifically for her concerts. And it was a meaningful impact to our business. And it just struck me then and there based on what we were planning to do around collective media that that just happened. We weren’t actually in control of that narrative. We weren’t tapping into kind of real time trends and what’s happening. 

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Richard

So on the back of that, one of our launch partners, Live Nation and Ticketmaster, we did something that when I heard about that scenario was- we know that you, are flying from A to B, right? They know that in that particular city, there are some seats available for the local jazz concert, a big tour, a this, that, and the other. So how can we join up the dots between the data that they have

Bennie

Right. Right.

Bennie

Right. Mm-hmm.

Richard 

and the data that we have. So we did some tests when we launched and it was various cities out to Las Vegas and we put up some ads on our in-flight entertainment screen knowing that people were flying to Las Vegas and you could queue our code and see exactly what was available seat wise, show wise that evening. And needless to say it worked and we sold many tens of thousands of tickets on the back of it. And that’s just one example of…

Bennie

Right.

Richard

I’d say it’s kind of strategically creative thinking in terms of solving a customer problem, not necessarily the creative ad, as it were. And that’s good example. And it bleeds into other areas like rideshare, planes are late, can we adjust the booking? Hotels, can we adjust things? So it just opens up a different way of thinking rather than here’s just an ad.

Bennie 

Well, it goes back to something you said before, moving from traveling to a travel mindset. What are those things that go into it which are not a surprise? You’re going to need transportation on the ground. You’re going to need food. You’re in the mood for having fun and music, so why not make some other recommendations? 

Richard 

Correct. Yeah, 100%.

Bennie

When I think about, we talk a lot about what drew people into marketing, and it’s clear your path has been about technology and data. So how did you start down that road? We were joking before about the early days of the internet and being on the edge of technology. Talk a bit about what brought Richard to Unite It.

Richard

Wow, that’s, it wasn’t a classical path put it that way. You see my background. So originally I trained as an accountant. So you go, how did you get into marketing?

Bennie

It’s okay. I know we still love accountants on the marketing podcast. But yes, so how did this happen, my friend?

Richard

I know. But yeah, so I trained as an accountant, I always thought that having a kind of financial training background would be good in business, but I had an entrepreneurial flair, I was had a kind of creative bent to my life. And then literally, I sort of met a bunch of people in this so called world of media and advertising and thought, yeah, it’s dynamic. It’s, certainly creative. Looks a lot of fun. So I made a strategic sort of pivot to move from mainstream top 10 leading accountancy practice in the world into one of the leading credit agencies, Saatchi and Saatchi, where I started. So that was the first pivot point. The second pivot point was we were literally at the start of this thing called the internet, which is showing my age. And you know, which is ultimately about data and numbers, and I was clearly, you know, quite strong at that. So I sort of got put to this bucket, well, you probably understand all that kind of thing. And the challenge in those early days, because I was at one of the leading creative agencies in the world, and they were worried about 60 second TV ads. And I was saying, well, there’s this thing called like a display ad, and it’s on the six of the internet. And needless to say, lots of expletives to say, get out of the room, we don’t do things like that. Anyway, roll forward, I did about 10 years in major advertising and digital media agencies around the world in

Bennie

Great, great. Right.

Richard 

UK and Europe and Asia, the States and back again. And then I made another big strategic move, knowing that there was this thing now called Facebook and YouTube, emerged this big sort of ad tech explosion. And we were sort of talking to back end it in the agency world, and doing a little bit of M&A and I thought, I I’m going to move. And it was at 2008 when Lehman’s crash, the media world was changing.

Bennie

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Richard

So I then made a pivot into the investment banker in media tech and M&A. Did that for four years, culturally bizarre, but I just really want to understand how to go and raise money, P, VC and IPO and do M&A and then have that skill set. And I then went into a big ad tech player called Tremor, now Tremor. Did that for five years and got lifted into Comcast and then more likely got lifted into United. So

Bennie

Right.

Richard

I’ve always, I guess, ridden the wave of technology and all the various immersions that have happened over the last 20 plus years. And I’m a builder and I like, you know, if I just end up managing stuff, I get bored. And I like building stuff, being at the sort of forefront of emerging new shiny things out there. So that was my background. So it’s not, setting up capital.

Bennie

Okay. Right.

Bennie 

And that’s why you’re a marketer, my friend, because you like to build stuff. I love the description you had in that moment of being an investment bank and talking about being self-aware and saying, this is a bizarre space. But understanding that even in those bizarre spaces, we can test ourselves, we can grow, we can pull tools and insights that we can use in other spaces. Looking at your expression of that time period, it’s like, I made it through there.

Richard

Yeah.

Bennie 

But look what I learned to do over here. So you’ve been in a role now a little over a year and a half. And one of the things that’s happened, we talk a lot about changes in consumer experience and expectations. And over the past couple of years, we’ve had this boom in travel, where people have been excited about pressing themselves to do more and travel. How has that impacted your thought about the business?

Bennie 

You know, our travel in 2018 was very different than our travel in 21, but nothing has prepared us for how we’re all thinking about traveling our lives today.

Richard

Yeah, and it’s been a seismic shift because of COVID. I think the world of buying sort of material things, new sofas and TVs, to kind of people in the world, all of us wanting to kind of have experience has been a big shift. And certainly I think the travel industry, whether it’s an airline or hotel group, you name any of the subverticals in that have really benefited from that. So I think that’s one major shift. And you’ve certainly seen the scale of that.

Bennie 

Mm.

Richard

And United is now the world’s largest airline and we’ve really grown both transatlantic and trans -pacific really on the back of that sort of big shift as the travel leisure players has really moved. But ultimately, that said, nothing’s really changed in terms of the remit that I’ve got, which is leading a major loyalty program and now setting up connected media. When I talked about my history, one of the first things I did, and I was doing a little bit of that, this internet, was direct marketing, which is old school envelopes, messages, letters to people in their home. It’s about personalization, right? And really understanding the individual. And I think what we’ve seen is shift.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Richard

Over the last 20 years. There’s a value exchange where nothing is for free, content isn’t necessarily for free. There is a value exchange and a lot of it is ads. Interestingly, when you look at Netflix, for instance, there was all this debate. It started off being a subscription model. I always said and vowed that it would have to move into the ad model.

And there’s a lot of people saying, no way would that happen. Then guess what it now has? Because, you know, when you’re investing in huge, awesome content that Netflix have, there is a delta, which is ads, and there is a revenue basis which kind of fills that gap up. So I think all of those things together, which is understanding the value of the consumer, getting more personalized and putting more content in front of them.

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Right. Right, right.

Richard 

Now in this world, a new world to me, which is the airline industry, brings a lot of certainly my personal experiences together in terms of how to build something on a more one-to-one basis that’s real-time, data enabled and not sort of rear view mirror. So it’s exciting.

BREAK

Bennie 

Now, when you think about your business, it’s not just the screen on the seat. You’re really kind of an omnichannel place. Talk a bit about how you think about going from the seat, to the airport, to the app, to kind of your web experience that you have with United. Because that all wraps in the loyalty program for you.

Richard

Yeah, it does. And this really is about sort of what we call pre, during and post travel. and listen, we all do it, you know, we’re out might be searching on various sites around where I may want to go. And then once you make that decision, you book an airline, maybe book a hotel and you book your car rental, then there’s a certain bunch of things that happen during that journey. And when you squeeze into that sort of travel day or the pre travel day,

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right.

Richard

Yeah, there are screens. There’s a United app that you have to look at. When’s the flight? Have you got to check in? All the data that goes into that. The day of travel, where’s the gate? You might be sitting in a lounge. You might connect to the Wi-Fi. There’s screens there. What other information can you serve up for the operational purposes to get person from where they are on time to get in the plane, but also other third party opportunities to put messaging in front of them. joining up. That omnichannel perspective from pre-, during and post-travel. And when I talk about post-travel in a more IP-enabled world that we live in, if I’ve sent certain messages to you during, across our own screens, I could then also target you at home with a more action-oriented message on your IP-enabled TV or your iPad or whatever that may be.

Bennie

Mm-hmm.

Richard

And that data is enabled across all other channels. We’re the first airline to go and join those dots up and across our own channels, but also outside of our platform as well, which is great. And it’s proving a great ROI for our partners.

Bennie 

And when we think about this ability to have this targeted content, I’m curious into the split you have between a B2B space and a consumer space. When someone’s traveling, and you and I have talked about we travel a lot for both business and life, understanding when I want to know about the Taylor Swift concert because I love Taylor Swift, or when do I want to know about the Taylor Swift concert because I’m in the entertainment business?

Richard

Yeah, it’s a great question because there are certain individuals who are both a business and just a normal non-business consumer. There’s an obvious starting point. It’s like maybe you’re on a business travel, you’re sitting at the front of the plane versus with your family, you’re sitting at the back of the plane. Is that a differentiator? 

Bennie 

Right.

Richard

We also, within the United world, we have direct corporate B2B relationships with a lot of major corporates, right? You get more various sort of deals, being a sort of corporate partner. So joining the dots up between a consumer versus we may know that you work with a specific big corporate and understanding and joining those dots up and based on where you’re sitting does allow us to…and using smart data and even AI, how we can kind of differentiate what messaging you may well see. And in fact, some of our launch partners, Bottega Veneta and McCallun Whiskey, we actually specifically targeted the front of the plane versus not actually targeting the back of the plane with those particular brands because they wanted a specific kind of audience base. So, and listen, the B2B market is a very hard market to target across any sector.

Bennie 

Mm-mm. Okay. Right. Right.

Richard 

It really is. So we do think there’s certain data points that we have and as I by definition you might be a business mass traveler seeing from the plane that helps us sort of differentiate that as well so just joining up those dots on our side could be pretty helpful to external third parties.

Bennie

So you started really rapidly this year. As you plan and look to 25 and 26, what are you most excited about? Now that you have the platform and you’re off to the races, what are you excited about?

Richard

It’s definitely now that we’ve formally launched and we’re certainly scaling in the back end of this year, there’s definitely sort of more scale as we go out. I think there’s a lot more opportunity to your earlier point around being a little bit more creative in terms of what we can do working with creative agencies. And I think, know, whether it’s, you know, customizing home pages, or I think there’s some interesting things there. But I think the other thing that, and you’ll probably hear some news about this shortly, is what that whole experience in the sky looks like. You know, it’s been an interesting one, because the world I’ve lived in for the last 20 plus years, and that we all do, you can see and do anything on your phone, right? And that’s an enabler.

You can snack on content whenever you wish, 24×7 across any specific screen. And then the reality is when you go into this big plane up in the sky, 35,000 feet and 600 miles an hour, it’s a world of difference, right? Some of that’s Wi-Fi connectivity and some of it’s the type of content that you can and cannot do. 

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right.

Richard

So I’ve sort of termed this little sentence that’s sort of came up to me in the first few weeks, everyone’s using it now, is how do we bring the living room experience into the sky? If you just think about those words, how that changes your mindset around what you can do and those early examples that we’re talking around, what mindset are you in when you’re on the plane? So I think things like e-commerce, gaming, streaming TV, again, all the things that we can do on earth that we should be able to do up in the sky…

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Richard 

I think is gonna be quite a game changer in terms of where we can potentially go to. Which is going to be pretty exciting and an awesome customer experience in many different ways.

Bennie

Here you talk about it, it does really get exciting. Because if in many respects, if I am a customer, I’m thinking about the sky, then you’re not winning, right? You’re winning when the space has nothing to do with the kind of experience, I’m completely dialed in the space. So I’m thinking about the fact that I’m in the air, then I’m not truly dialed into the space. I love the living room in the sky.

Richard

Yeah, and you know what? It’s a behavior change because even those words, and I have used this internally and frankly for any airline, that there’s just an expectation today that you can’t do all the things that you do on earth in the sky, right? So we’re going to have to kind of handhold and change the behavior of people to go, you know, today I have to kind of pre -download.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Richard 

A movie that I want to watch on my iPad because I know it’s not on the in-flight entertainment screen or there is no streaming services or I can’t buy something on Amazon or do my banking or all of those types of things that we do every day and we take for granted. We take a step back in time when you go on the plane and I think that opportunity to kind of bring that living room experience into the sky really opens up your mind as to where this can potentially go. And I think we’re just, just being bit more smarter on serving up ads is just a start of where we think we want to go, which is pretty exciting.

Bennie

So when you think about the ads and in your conversation about what content you can or can’t get, maybe think about this in the global context, what are the creative tensions that you have with brands participating who may not be fully global? Because you’ve got a tremendous flight footprint of places that you’re going in and out of, how do you think about global brands that are showing up in these spaces?

Richard 

Yep.

Richard

Yeah, that’s a great question. And there’s a couple of answers to that because there’s global brands that you might be flying from New York to Paris and who’s on that flight? What message should they receive? Are they coming back the same way? Do they want to buy that brand in that country? Do you know what? If you fly to the Middle East, maybe you can’t even have alcohol brands, right? So there’s all sorts of different things there.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Richard 

The point about it comes all the way back to understanding who’s sitting in that seat. Yeah, we’ve talked about addressable TV on earth. The place where we’re going to get to in the sky is an addressable TV, which is individual to you. Now, clearly, Wi-Fi connectivity in real time will allow us to make those ad decisions on the fly in real time. Are we there yet today because we don’t necessarily have perfect Wi-Fi, but you can pre-cash. We know within two weeks of a plane going around 90% of everyone that’s going on that flight. So you can make pre -cash ad decisions down to that seat back and therefore not everyone’s going to see the same brand depending on what destination you’re going to and who that specifically is. So that’s one area. 

Bennie

Right. Okay.

Richard 

The second area is also, do know what? It’s in fairly close confinement, right? I’m sitting right next to you. I can visually see you. That’s exactly the scenario that we’re sitting in, looking at your screen. Are there certain verticals that you probably wouldn’t want to be showing ads that are pertinent to Benny versus pertinent to Richard in that more open space? Probably not, right? So there are kind of approved lists and not approved lists of certain verticals or even brands that we wouldn’t want to kind of touch.

Bennie

Okay, right. Right, right.

Richard 

In that environment because it’s not personal to you. So there’s some detailed nuance that we need to think about as we scale this out.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Bennie

Right. Because in addition to do not harm, you have a maxim of do not embarrass me, right, with the ads or do not create ads that I then have to explain to the back of the plane to my children. are next to these are all these are all the fun places in there. So you know, we talk about the the sexy parts of the integration, right, the technology, the media, the advertising.

Richard

100%, 100%, 100%.

Richard 

Exactly right, yeah, exactly right.

Bennie

Airlines are complicated business with lots of legacy moving parts. How have you been able to keep up with the embedded hardware to match the systems that you have? You know, the newer planes, are wonderful with all of the spaces in there. How are you able to retrofit or keep this platform moving in all the experiences?

Richard

Yep.

Richard

Yeah, that’s a great question.To answers that. One is actually, and I take my hat off to a lot of my colleagues in the airline, when I sort of walked in, no one kind of knew about the ad business at all. So a lot of this is education and handholding and taking people on a journey for sure, right? So that’s critical and sort of like a base layer of this is where we’re trying to get to and there’s certain things we’re going to have to build and I’m going to have to also understand around plane types and legacy systems, new systems and hardware and software and God knows what. And then there’s the practicalities, right? And we see this on certain planes. You’ve got old direct TV screens there where clearly at some point, at some point you used to swipe your credit card and that’s just, you know, old tech that frankly you can’t do anything about, right? 

Bennie

Right. Right.

Richard

And one thing I have learned when I said airline business is a very complicated business. Decisions that you make today sometimes take three to four to five years to actually happen in realistic terms, right? So in COVID, Scott Kirby, our CEO, ordered 800 kind of new planes during the depths of COVID. Those planes aren’t coming on the That’s a 10 -year investment of planes coming every year, right? So you can’t change

Bennie 

Mm. Hmm. Right.

Richard

Technology is great and I come from a world where you can sort of move pretty quickly in airline terms because these are big planes, right? And they’re very expensive things. You have to have this transition of sort of legacy tech and there’s certain limitations of things you can do and then new planes where we can roll out this new software and technology very, very quickly. And we are at that point, you we’ve got roughly 200 and…

Bennie 

Right.

Richard 

50-odd planes with all the new tech, targetability, frequency capping, a whole bunch of stuff. And that’s great. And we’ve got legacy planes that is a little bit more mass for now. We’re transitioning, we’re retrofitting, and we’re taking on new planes. So there’s this sort of transition. So it’s not as simple as everyone’s got a TV, let’s put a new software update, and we flick a switch, and everyone gets the same thing. It’s very, very different in the airline industry, which is a different challenge to deal

Bennie

Right, right.

Bennie 

What I love is in listening to talk about, was going to ask the question about how has this shaped your philosophy of innovation, but you can hear it coming through where you’re looking at, okay, innovation writ large, and then we’re going to figure out ways in which we get there. We’re going to innovate it. We’re going to innovate in lots of different ways to get to this massive uptake. What advice do you have with marketers who may be in industries where they have, you know, legacy practice or legacy systems and they’re moving along, but they have a mandate to grow?

Richard 

Yeah. Yeah.

Bennie 

And be dynamic, which I think is more common than people would expect. Grow and be dynamic on top of a legacy industry.

Richard 

Yeah, it’s a great question and something I probably couldn’t have answered that 18 months ago because I’ve always been in an industry where it has been very dynamic.

I think the key thing is, having seen this live, is define your mission, define the vision and stick to that path. Because there’s certain things in terms of legacy tech, it is just time and there’s certain things that you just can’t do. But the only thing you can change is tomorrow. You can’t change yesterday. So in terms of new technology, new hardware, new planes, new different stuff that’s coming on, that’s what you can influence and that’s where the future scale will be.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Richard

You can’t necessarily turn back time and go, I wish I could. If you could make that just 10 % better than it was yesterday versus 100%, you’d take that, right? So take the 10 % and work on the 100%, even though maybe that’s less scale, you know you’ll get there and stick to that line. So it’s probably a simple answer in logic, but it’s just very pragmatic way of doing it.

Bennie

Yeah, right. It’s one of those things that we need to state out loud, right? Because you get into the mix and you don’t think about it. Like, well, I need everything to transform. But it’s these building blocks that allow you to move everything forward. What’s been powerful is that you’ve come in as a non-airline executive to build great credibility in this space based off of your engagement of marketing, data, and the consumer. 

Richard

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Bennie

As a lot of our listeners to our podcast are dealing with their own innovation challenges in their own spaces of dealing with a rapidly evolving consumer base. What advice do you have for marketers in getting the most from consumer data with getting the most and understanding consumer behavior changes? You know, we talked about this over that span of the 20 years we’ve been talking internet, how much have we changed what data we expect, what data we give, what data we create? And what data we want as a part of our marketing.

Richard

It literally is down to having a unified understanding and a 360 degree view of your customer. Now that’s easier said than done and I can talk about this from a United perspective. There’s operational data which are important for you to get you from A to B, checking in and all that operational stuff for you to get on an airline versus a marketing perspective. From a marketing and loyalty mileage plus perspective, which is very different. So how you thread the needle about getting a kind of unique ID around you as Benny versus me as Richard. And then ultimately, from an advertising perspective, it’s still about, there’s a degree of yes personalization, but there has to be scale. If there’s only one Richard Nunn in a plane and Mercedes may want to target me.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Richard 

Is that worth doing versus if there’s 50 of Richard Nunn’s? You’ve still got to have the scale. So you’ve still got to roll up the level of that detail down to that, those sort of segments, those audience segments. But ultimately things haven’t changed. But I think what has changed, which is good, is technology has now enabled us to be more predictive and more real time and more actionable around that.

Bennie

Right.

Richard

So I think that’s been the big leap. But ultimately the core principles of really how I started out, which was actually at a basic level for all things direct marketing, is kind of know your customer and make sure that you’re sending the right message at the right time in the right channel. Those fundamentals really haven’t changed, but it’s more about the real time and technology enabled piece and AI getting more optimized messaging and not one standard messaging for everybody. That’s really changed the game over the last few years.

Bennie 

So I’ll ask you this question. How would you define loyalty today after 18 months in this role? What does loyalty look like and mean to you?

Richard 

That, well, it’s a great question. And this, we’re now actually trying to answer that direct question because in my view and our view, if you think about loyalty programs, whether it’s a retailer, an airline, a hotel group, if you actually practically think of them, you know, we all, we’re all members of it. things actually haven’t dramatically changed since inception.

Bennie 

Mmm.

Richard

They’re very much sort of look back, you did something at some point, a transaction, you have accumulated some form of miles or points or whatever, you may want to transact on that at some point, maybe you can’t when you want to, right? And all the building blocks that I’ve kind of broadly shared with you that I can today, which is…understanding who the individual is, making it technology enabled, be more deterministic and predictive. Because I would much rather hear in terms of quote unquote loyalty, and maybe it’s not loyalty, it’s kind of reward, not loyalty, is serve up, you understand about me, serve up more relevance to me so that you can be more predicted to say, hey, I’ve seen that you’ve been doing lots of skiing or you go to the Caribbean.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Richard 

What’s next? Hey, there’s some flights available in three weeks time at this great hotel with these points. Is that of interest to you? So be more predictive rather than it’s down. You should put it back on the customer to they’ve accumulated something. They’ve got to make the transaction and that’s the shift that we want to move to through real time technology and understanding you and just laying stuff out for you. And then you can make the choices.

Bennie

Mm-hmm.

Richard 

So that’s a big shift that we’re literally kind of live and unleashed looking at because we do think there’s kind of a loyalty 2.0 that is yet to be kind of unpacked.

Bennie

Right.

Bennie

Which is really powerful when you think about an extended loyalty, right? With knowing you and being a guide as you go through, because it’s not, what you described is not a creepy experience. It’s an experience that’s credible and enhancing. And to associate with it.

Richard 

Yeah, I agree.

Bennie 

Well, Richard, as we think about this, what advice do you have for our next trip? Now, we were coming to you because you’re the expert now. So what advice do you have for us to take advantage of these new advances to get the most of this experience? As marketers, it’s incredibly fun to watch the work that you’re doing and to be a part of that journey, life cycle from selecting a destination, being a part of the trip, going into the app and then with the content. But for our marketers who are listening, what do you, what should we look out for in this process?

Richard

In terms of my fundamental message, I think stay relevant. Technology never stands still. I think I’ve learned that. I enjoy that change. It never stands still, so stay relevant. I think the other thing is, as you and I briefly discussed before we got on this podcast,

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Richard

Yeah, this new buzzword of artificial intelligence and gen AI, you know, lean into that, that that is a game changer. And we talked about the internet being a game changer 20, 25 years ago. And it has, and it is, and it still is. This is like 10, 100 X in terms of what we’re trying to scrap to the surface. So stay relevant, lean into kind of new technologies, learn and just play.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Richard

But also just push yourself and just continue to learn. Have big ears and a small mouth and ask the right questions. But listen, listen and learn from each other because we’re all kind of making it up as we go along to some degree, especially in the world of technology. And test and learn your way out of it. So, stay relevant is probably the key message.

Bennie 

Right, right, right.

Bennie 

Well, I can’t think of a better way to close out our conversation. Those are wise words. Stay relevant from a builder, strategist, creative data scientist, mindset shifter, my friend, from traveling to travel, and really, an innovator. I appreciate you joining so much and responding to me. When I saw what you were doing, I was like, we have to have a conversation about this. Continue the transformative work.

And we’ll continue to of lean in, as you said before, to learning, to AI, to transformative ways that marketing and tech can change our business and our world. Thank you, Richard, for joining us. And thank you all for being here for this episode of AMAs Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F Johnson. Please explore more about the work that Richard is doing with United Airlines and the Knowledge Plus program. Check out the new ad network and ad tech they’re using in space.

And as you think about your own multi-channel and AI driven marketing, we invite you to join us at the AMA for the latest and emerging strategies and technology. Thank you once again for being a part of this podcast. Thank you.