If United Airlines wants to tailor seat-back ads to whomever is sitting there, it should pay for the privilege.
Video screens on the backs of seats inside a United Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft are shown on Nov. 4, 2012. Over the past few years, American Airlines steadily removed seat-back screens from almost all of its domestic fleet. The airline’s rationale was that people now bring their own screens wherever they may roam, so there’s no reason to add the cost and weight of providing them when they won’t be missed.
So if there’s a business traveler who enjoys going abroad in seat 4B, ads could show her pictures of the beach in Aruba. If that’s a senior citizen in 11C, he might like to know about luxury retirement communities. And if that’s a little kid in 11B, a candidate for screaming and fidgeting all the way to Orlando, he could be shown cool toys available at the airport when he arrives.
These platforms only appear to be free. You give up masses of personal information, and that allows them to bypass the wastefulness of old-school advertising, which inevitably reaches the uninterested along with its targets. We may one day rebel against this as a society but for now these practices are ascendant.
Those who push targeted ads usually trot out the line that consumers find them helpful. Not at 30,000 feet, they don’t. Not when they’re stuck in a middle seat, they don’t.
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