Ekrem Dimbiloglu spends his days helping decide what people watch on one of the largest streaming services in the country. As many as 200 million people every year can watch new movies and shows on the platform he oversees, including new Hollywood releases, foreign-language titles, and classic TV shows.

But we’re not talking about Netflix, Disney+, or HBO Max. We’re talking about Delta Studio, the in-flight entertainment option for passengers on any of Delta Air Lines’s 730-plane fleet.

“We want the seatback screen that’s in front of you to be kind of like the television at your house,” Dimbiloglu, managing director of brand experience for Delta Studio and wi-fi, told Marketing Brew.

Bird’s-eye view: Airlines across the country are operating what are essentially their own streaming services, licensing shows, movies, and other forms of entertainment. It’s an arrangement that helps airline brands stand out among their competition while giving entertainment companies, including streaming services, a way to win over audiences.

After all, if audiences get hooked on a show mid-flight, they might just seek out the service and subscribe after landing. “These partners that we work with are hoping to get more eyeballs on their content and to just reach people that maybe aren’t subscribing today,” Meghan Lemke, American Airlines’ manager of onboard products, told Marketing Brew.

“Our own little streaming platform”

Curating in-flight entertainment is complicated. At both airlines, content licensing is evaluated monthly using data from the airlines’ consumer-insights departments, company research about programming trends, and historical data about what fliers have watched in the past.

• External third parties can also help make decisions about what content to curate. At Delta, United Talent Agency helps the airline identify and arrange licensing for upcoming titles that may be popular in the coming 12–18 months, Dimbiloglu said. To keep content fresh, licensing deals are often structured to last only around six to nine months, Lemke said.
• The content-curation process requires mixing broad-appeal titles with niche content. Documentaries and foreign-language titles are often part of the programming mix to account for different tastes, as is content meant to appeal to younger or family-oriented viewers. Like at-home streaming services, there’s no right answer when it comes to curating a content library.

It’s not lost on the airlines that they’re operating similarly to Netflix or Disney+. “We sometimes joke and talk about how we do have our own little streaming platform, essentially, on the aircraft,” Lemke said.

Keep reading here.—KS

It’s not great to see headlines about a recession. Last week, Insider reported that Microsoft has pressed pause on TV advertising. According to the pub, “One person with direct knowledge said Microsoft made the advertising cuts in the face of rising interest rates and supply-chain challenges to avoid layoffs.”

Big picture: Publicis’s Zenith corrected its global ad-spending forecast last week, lowering expected growth for 2022 from 9.1% to 8%—totaling about $781 billion—citing the war in Ukraine. Even so, it said, “ad spend has remained on track despite the macroeconomic headwinds that emerged this year.”

GroupM, which revised its annual forecast today, adjusted from 9.7% to 8.4% (not including political ads in the US).

As one advertiser put it, “Not great, Bob!”

Stay calm: Media agencies aren’t waving red flags yet. Looking at GroupM’s report, global television advertising is expected to grow 4% this year, digital advertising will grow 12%, and out-of-home will grow 12%.

“Although the overall economy and environment is incrementally more negative now than it was back in December, I think that—broadly speaking—people in our industry, and many pundits, much that’s in the press, is overly negative relative to the reality of how the overall economy is faring,” Brian Wieser, global president of business intelligence at GroupM, said during a briefing last week.

And if things do get bad, marketers will figure it out when the time comes. At least that’s what Digiday found when asking advertising execs about ad spend amid recession fears. “I think people are too afraid of missing revenue targets to pull back…Lots of people want to believe they can be the outlier in a macro downturn,” one exec said.

+1: The top five sellers of advertising in 2021 were Google, Meta, Alibaba, Bytedance, and Amazon, generating $408 billion in advertising revenue, about 53% of the global total, according to GroupM.—RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Write it down: Check out these 10 tips for better SEO copywriting, because it’s not not rocket science these days.

Brand building: Morning Brew’s managing editor Neal Freyman recently talked with Bethenny Frankel, the brain behind Skinnygirl cocktails. Read their conversation here.

Land the plane page: You get a landing page, you get a landing page, everybody gets a landing page (with these seven best landing-page builders for 2022, obviously).

Looking for more? Marketing Brew’s latest article dives into celebrities and their advertising side hustles. Click here for the article, sponsored by StackAdapt.*

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Great question, 1964 TV ad.

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