Viasat Ads is a new way for advertisers and brands to reach consumers on their travel journey, in a controlled and captive environment. One where passengers are feeling relaxed, actively engaged in media and have a heightened propensity to buy.
Viasat Ads is a complete advertising solution that enables brands to deliver engaging ads and content to airline passengers:
- Reaching real people, in real airline seats, removing the risk of fake clicks or views
- Targeting specifically by airline, city, region , route or airport - as well as by device type, dayparting
- Supported by Viasat’s technical experience and expertise and our commitment to delivering a first-class, personalized passenger experience
Table of Contents
Editorial and Content Guidelines
Best practices for creating campaigns that connect with airline passengers
Editorial Guidelines
It’s important to recognize that the in-flight environment is largely enclosed. In it, a single screen may be visible to many different people, each with their own sensibilities, tastes, and cultural differences. It’s vital that content is tailored accordingly, and that nothing blatantly inappropriate is placed on screens or devices.
Please avoid providing any content that includes:
Indecent material
- Violent imagery
- Pornographic or indecent material
- Graphic, traumatic, or distressing imagery
- Depictions of drug abuse
Restricted products, services & viewpoints
- Advertising for car rental services
- Advertising for transport modes or companies that compete with air travel
- Advertising for gambling
- Advertising for smoking or vaping
- Advertising alcoholic products is currently not permitted
- Religious content
- Political content
Air travel content
- Content that may cause negative feelings towards air travel as a means of transport
- Content that could be construed as an attack on airlines or airline staff or passengers
- Content that features a specific airline logo or aircraft, unless agreed in advance with Viasat
- Advertising for any specific airline, online travel operators, or tour operators
Controversial entities
- Advertisements from companies that have experienced a scandal within the previous six months
- Advertisements for companies who have controversial business practices, such as those causing ecological harm
- We will not accept any advertising with celebrity endorsements or featuring any celebrities of any kind
Our teams will review each piece of content before it is placed on our platform to ensure it meets our guidelines. If we find that it may be inappropriate for the onboard environment or the in-flight audience, the content may be rejected.
Creative Best Practices
Here are a few simple rules and best practices that you’ll want to follow to best connect with airline passengers.
Best practice when creating your campaigns:
When creating offer tiles/banners
- Make sure that branding is clear and consistent
- Address the in-flight context
- Personalize your creative assets based on destinations, key dates, or events wherever possible
- Make sure your incentive or offer is truly enticing — ask yourself, from the point of view of a passenger, would it be worth your time and effort to follow through?
- Create an effective call to action — speaking directly to the customer is often more effective than the simple ‘learn more’
- Keep text to a minimum
When creating landing pages
- Ensure they’re lean and optimized for fast loading
- Create a custom landing page that recognises the context for visitor (viewing in-flight); avoid using your standard homepage (too heavy and slow to load)
- Think ‘mobile first’ — iOS should be a priority when targeting US domestic flyers
- Use only essential tags and keep analytics and retargeting tools to a minimum
- Avoid heavy graphic components
- Focus on a single product or service per page — don’t link to a whole catalogue
- Offer a newsletter or social media subscription for your audience to follow
- Make subsequent visits easy — for example, redirect users to the page after collecting emails/social follows
- Include a UTM tag within your landing page URL
When creating video ads
- Make sure that branding is clear and consistent
- Leverage vertical video — tactics appropriate to social media sites like TikTok or Instagram will also be largely appropriate for our platform
- Keep videos under 30 seconds, or ideally 15
- Reinforce calls to action
- Provide accurate and legible subtitles
Ad formats & specifications
All the info you need to deliver your campaigns in the correct specifications
Sponsored Access & Digital Advertising Formats
Leverage a range of compelling ad units that will connect, engage, and drive response – whatever the campaign objective.
Sponsored Internet: 'Watch Ad'
Passengers watch your non-skippable ad and are redirected to your website in return for access to a free Wi-Fi session.
Sponsored Internet: 'Try ad'
Passengers are given free access to your service to use inflight without having to pay for Wi-Fi access.
Digital Advertising: Pre-Roll video
Passengers watch your unskippable video ad before being able to watch their chosen inflight entertainment content on their personal device.
Digital Advertising: Live TV ad insertion
Your ad is inserted into the Live TV channel during the normal commercial break slots.
Campaign Reporting
Use your online dashboard to track and optimize your campaigns
Gain instant information on your campaign. Our reporting dashboard provides near real-time data on campaign performance, ensuring you're always in the know.
- Understand key delivery information like spend, days remaining, as well as overall campaign delivery at a glance.
- Easily track key metrics such as impressions, clicks, and actions all in one intuitive interface.
- Maximize ROI: Work with us to optimize your campaigns for maximum impact and return on investment.
Creating an account to view campaign performance
You can request an account if one hasn’t automatically been created for you when you book your first campaign. Alternatively, your Account Manager will reach out to let you know this has been created for you.
To access the portal, you’ll need to:
- Open https://insights.viasat.com/ads
- Click the "Secure Login" button.
- Enter your username (name.surname)
- Click "Next".
- Click the ”Forgot Password" link. (there is No Password assigned at this stage)
- An email will be sent with a link to reset your password - follow those instructions.
- Once complete, you should be able to log in.
Please contact us at advertising@viasat.com, or reach out to your Account Manager, if you're having trouble logging in or with any feedback or suggested improvements.
FAQs
Your questions answered.
While we are always on-hand to answer any questions you might have, here are answers to those most asked. If you have any other questions, please contact your account manager or email us at advertising@viasat.com
You can talk to your Account Lead about your specific use case, but campaign extensions are generally possible with no extra costs associated. This type of modification will require revision to the signed IO. Lead time for implementation from the moment a revised IO is finalized is 24 hours.
24-48 hours from the moment a campaign is finalized. This include a signed IO by both parties with the breakdown of ad units, rate, and targeting, creatives submitted within specs and approved by Viasat and our airline partners.
You can log into our reporting dashboard anytime to view near real time reporting on your campaign.
Yes, you can – please speak with Account Lead with your request.
24 hours from the moment submitted creatives are approved by Viasat and our airline partners.
Impressions, Viewable Impressions, Clicks, Click-through Rate, Activations, Action Rate, and Spend.
You will track visitors to your website from your campaign with us in your analytics tool. It's normal that there might be a small delta between the redirect number we state and what your tool reports. This small delta can be due to a few factors such as network latency over the satellite network and content heavy websites with slow load times where passengers are impatient and jump to another site before waiting for the sponsor website to fully load. If you are seeing a large variation (>10%) it may be due to how your analytics tool is setup.
There are several ways to trigger your analytics tag to fire on your page in Google Tag Manager (GTM) or Adobe Launch:
- Page View (GTM) is the most common Google Analytics trigger used because it fires as soon as the page starts to load. We found this is not recommended for pages loading in an inflight environment. The page needs a little more time to load in some cases.
- DOM Ready (GTM & Adobe) is the recommended event to fire your Analytics tag on in both Adobe Launch and Google Tag Manager. The event will fire when the objects on the page physically exist, but not necessarily when all your content has loaded. This is good option for in-flight landing pages.
- Library Loaded (Adobe) or Page Top is another option in Adobe Launch which may work well for some pages if there are page views missing with DOM Ready.
- Window Loaded (GTM & Adobe) is the slowest to fire your Analytics tag and may be a good option on heavier pages with a lot of content.
- Page Bottom (Adobe) is not recommended as a method to trigger analytics tags for the inflight environment
Connect with us
Do you have any questions, comments, or concerns about any part of the process? Please use the form to contact us or visit our website for more information.