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 that 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
- Finance brands may be rejected by some airlines because they already have existing finance partners
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.
Working with Viasat Ads teams
Dedicated partner support
Please email adops@viasat.com for correspondence between the two teams. This email address should be used for inventory forecast checks, brand and creative approvals, IO setup, and ongoing campaign management and reporting discussions.
Inventory forecast requests
Send inventory availability requests to Ad Operations for prospective campaigns. Please include flight duration, targeting parameters (such as airlines and geolocation), and ad types in your request.
Brand & creative approvals
Share client brand materials and creatives with Viasat for internal and airline approvals before IOs are signed
Campaign IO setup
Once the campaign parameters are agreed upon by both parties and brand creatives receive approval, Viasat will build and issue the relevant IO for the partner's signature before the go-live time
Campaign performance management & reporting
Partners are empowered with access to Insights, our state-of-the-art, web-based reporting platform that reports campaign delivery for their campaigns in near real-time. Access to Insights and training will be provided to new partners
Targeting overview
Viasat Ads provides advertisers multiple unique ways to target the in-flight passenger. You can find more details on these below.
| TERM | DESCRIPTION |
| Destination | Target all flights flying into a destination. E.g. all flights flying into New York (note this would cover all airports in New York) |
| Origin | Target all flights leaving from an origin, e.g. all flights flying out from New York |
| Route | Target all flights flying on a specific route e.g. all flights on a route from New York to Los Angeles |
| Airport | Target flight flying to or from a certain airport (one or many) e.g. all flights flying into/from JFK |
| City | Target a specific city e.g. flights flying into or from New Orleans |
| MSA | (Metropolitan Statistical Areas) - Target flights by MSA region |
| DMA | (Designated Market Area) - Target flights by DMA Region |
| Country | Target by flights Country – all flights flying into, from and in Mexico |
| Airline | Target by specific airline |
| Channel | Target by Tv Channel (LiveTV only) |
| Other Targeting | We also offer the ability to target by Language, Device, Browser and OS |
Note: If a campaign is Untargeted, it will target any routes/origins/destinations that the airline flies to and from. This could mean your ad will display on US Domestic and International flights.
Explore some of our targeting here: https://audience-explorer.viasat.com/
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
24 - 48 hours from the moment a campaign is finalized. This includes 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 your Account Lead about your request.
24 - 48 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 for there to be a slight discrepancy 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 set up.
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
This is due to real-time changes in the number of passengers onboard targeted flights, the number of flights changing day to day and other scheduling changes.
Flights often change with seasonality so that it’s not a guarantee if a campaign’s chosen targeting will work all times of the year. Viasat will actively suggest the best alternatives for you in this case.
We cannot customize a portal and do not offer this option.
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.