United Airlines merged the media sales and operations team at Kinective Media, its two-year-old ad network, with the partnerships team at MileagePlus, its loyalty program, according to Mitchell Parton at Adweek. Chief commercial officer Andrew Nocella told employees in a letter that Kinective is profitable but can’t succeed at scale until every United plane has Starlink Wi-Fi and seat-back screens, and the airline builds its own software for customer data, ad delivery and in-seat measurement. Until then, Nocella wrote, United gets its best return from promoting its own products, its credit cards and MileagePlus partners. United says Kinective isn’t shutting down, but it wouldn’t say how many jobs are affected after several of the unit’s leaders left this year.
