This post was created in partnership with Lyft Ads
When Liz Kneebone, vp of community programs and development at ADWEEK, left for Cannes this week, she almost didn’t make it. A World Cup match had gridlocked New York City traffic, her Lyft rerouted her to the PATH train, and a United flight out of Newark held its doors just long enough for her to board with a minute to spare.
It was, as she told an audience at Cannes Lions aboard the IRCODE yacht at Cannes Lions, a perfect demonstration of how consumers engage with brands through journeys.
“My trip to Cannes would not have happened without the seamless experience of how [these two brands] work together,” Kneebone said.
“That’s such a real use case,” said Shane Dwyer, vp of advertiser solutions at Lyft Ads, who co-hosted the panel with Julia Fedor, director of brand marketing operations at United Airlines. “We all use rideshare, so we all understand it.”
The session, part of ADWEEK House Cannes Lions’ Yacht Row programming, centered on a simple premise: The moments people spend in transit—in a rideshare or on a plane—represent an underutilized media channel. Both Lyft and United are betting heavily on that premise, and increasingly, together.
A partnership built on shared data and shared users
The Lyft-United relationship predates the two companies’ ad businesses working together. United’s MileagePlus members have been able to earn United miles on Lyft rides for several years, but the two companies recently announced what Dwyer called version “2.0” of the partnership that now allows travelers to redeem United miles directly to pay for Lyft rides.
“We’re starting to look at the…interoperability between the currency of…membership loyalty programs,” Dwyer said. “About 20% of our rides layer into travel-based rides. The travel angle of rideshare is so important.”
For United, the partnership makes strategic sense at scale. Fedor told the audience that United became the world’s largest airline a few years ago, flying 175 million customers across nearly 5,000 daily flights to more than 380 destinations last year. That volume generates substantial first-party data, making United an attractive media partner.
“To get through an airport and onboard a plane, you have to have a government ID, your passport, your Real ID,” Fedor said. “So we know that our data is solid. We have over 100 different attributes and demographic information about our customers.”
The rideshare moment
At the center of Lyfts’ pitch to marketers is what Dwyer describes as a uniquely receptive consumer. Lyft users spend an average of about 24 minutes in the app per ride. This is the window the company has built an advertising product around.
“Everyone knows that rideshare moment where you leave kind of a chaotic household and you get in your car and you’re like, oh my gosh, this is awesome,” Dwyer said. “There are no expectations of me right now, right? And in that moment, we’ve built a really unique advertising product when people are hyper receptive, when people are going out, when people have those kinds of dopamine and serotonin spikes that are happening.”
