Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers Curating the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertainment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle The rise of everywhere content Making brand connections A global creative community Giving your brand a voice Content curation is brand vision Content that lives on all platforms Platform agnostic content The future of IFE Innovative entertainment Productions Idents Ancillary revenues Revenue generation Magazines Websites Apps Hardware vision E-zines Audio Video productions Safety videos Social media management Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers Curating the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertainment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle The rise of everywhere content Making brand connections A global creative community Giving your brand a voice Content curation is brand vision Content that lives on all platforms Platform agnostic content The future of IFE Innovative entertainment Productions Idents Ancillary revenues Revenue generation Magazines Websites Apps Hardware vision E-zines Audio Video productions Safety videos Social media management Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers Curating the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertain-ment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle The rise of everywhere content Making brand connections A global creative community Giving your brand a voice Content curation is brand vision Content that lives on all platforms Platform agnostic content The future of IFE Innovative entertainment Productions Idents Ancillary revenues Revenue generation Magazines Websites Apps Hardware vision E-zines Audio Video productions Safety videos Social media management Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers Curating the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertainment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle The rise of everywhere content Making brand connections A global creative community Giving your brand a voice Content curation is brand vision Content that lives on all platforms Platform agnostic content The future of IFE Innovative entertainment Productions Idents Ancillary revenues Revenue generation Magazines Websites Apps Hardware vision E-zines Audio Video productions Safety videos Social media management Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers Curating the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertainment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle The rise of everywhere content Making brand connections A global creative community Giving your brand a voice Content curation is brand vision Content that lives on all platforms Platform agnostic content The future of IFE Innovative entertainment Productions Idents Ancillary revenues Revenue generation Magazines Websites Apps Hardware vision E-zines Audio Video productions Safety videos Social media management Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers Curating the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertain-ment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle The rise of everywhere content Making brand connections A global creative community Giving your brand a voice Content curation is brand vision Content that lives on all platforms Platform agnostic content The future of IFE Innovative entertainment Productions Idents Ancillary revenues Revenue generation Magazines Websites Apps Hardware vision E-zines Audio Video productions Safety videos Social media management Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers Curating the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertainment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle The rise of everywhere content Making brand connections A global creative community Giving your brand a voice Content curation is brand vision Content that lives on all platforms Platform agnostic content The future of IFE Innovative entertainment Productions Idents Ancillary revenues Revenue generation Magazines Websites Apps Hardware vision E-zines Audio Video productions Safety videos Social media management Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers Curating the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertainment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle The rise of everywhere content Making brand connections A global creative community Giving your brand a voice Content curation is brand vision Content that lives on all platforms Platform agnostic content The future of IFE Innovative entertainment Productions Idents Ancillary revenues Revenue generation Magazines Websites Apps Hardware vision E-zines Audio Video productions Safety videos Social media management Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers We curate the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertain-ment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle The rise of everywhere content Making brand connections A global creative community Giving your brand a voice Content curation is brand vision Content that lives on all platforms Platform agnostic content The future of IFE Innovative entertainment Productions Idents Ancillary revenues Revenue generation Magazines Websites Apps Hardware vision E-zines Audio Video productions Safety videos Social media management Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers We curate the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertainment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle The rise of everywhere content Making brand connections A global creative community Giving your brand a voice Content curation is brand vision Content that lives on all platforms Platform agnostic content The future of IFE Innovative entertainment Productions Idents Ancillary revenues Revenue generation Magazines Websites Apps Hardware vision E-zines Audio Video productions Safety videos Social media management Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers We curate the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertainment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle The rise of everywhere content Making brand connections A global creative community Giving your brand a voice Content curation is brand vision Content that lives on all platforms Platform agnostic content The future of IFE Innovative entertainment Productions Idents Ancillary revenues Revenue generation Magazines Websites Apps Hardware vision E-zines Audio Video productions Safety videos Social media management Content on the go The marriage of content and marketing Engagement equals loyal passengers We curate the customer experience Monetizing every customer touchpoint The entertain-ment experience The customer experience Brand strategy The journey cycle Making brand connections A global creative

CURATED BY

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Spafax

CEONiall McBain

President, Content Marketing

Raymond Girard

VP, Spafax USAAl St. Germain

CFOSimon Ogden

Executive VP, Media

Katrin Kopvillem

MD, Specialized Networks & Development

Ann Willis

CTOTony Taverner

Executive VP, Inflight Entertainment,

EMEASue Pinfold

Contents

Letter from Our CEO3

Creating and Curating Content4

Engaging the Transumer6

Building Brands8

Designing Across Platforms10

Empowering Community12

Talking Travel and Digital with Sir Martin Sorrell

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A Word from Sparksheet15

Now Playing

Content on the Go

Advertising and Corporate Messaging

Branding and Identity

Content Promotion

Inflight World

New Platforms

About Sparksheet

3

The Rise of Everywhere Content

At Spafax we see ourselves at the vanguard of content innovation, bringing content to the heart of business enterprise, helping to drive growth and opportunity through the customer experience.

Our clients, from airlines and hotels to retail and pharmaceutical, are amongst the most connected brands in the world. There is an increasing need for flexibility and diversity in managing channels alongside the live experience. Thanks to mobile and social media, products and services are now available to customers to purchase or engage in across every environ-ment and mode, including those that were previously considered offline.

Every smartphone-equipped customer is a potential point of sale or point of influence, wherever they are. Customers expect everything from content. They’ll read, watch, listen, reply, share, download and play with it. And they’ll do it on the bus, at the gym, or at the mall.

Today, Spafax connects the touchpoints of these environments with targeted media solutions, addressing audiences in different modes with entertainment, interaction and information. A social media story that connects with the brand’s internet offer – say, a destination promotion – may depend on bespoke content featured in multiple LCD screen environments, including an elevator up to an office floor 3,000 miles away!

As the customer experience of many client categories evolves into a myriad of touchpoints, content plays its part with greater relevance and greater results.

Spafax innovates, by editorial curation, production, design and scheduling of content, across any medium, channel or technology, wherever our clients can seed enterprise in their customers’ experience.

Niall McBainCEO, Spafax

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Creating and Curating Content

We live in a world where almost everything is content and it is this content that makes up the stories of our lives.Content marketing is about using words (and pictures and drawings and sounds…) to sell stuff. Content strategy is about using words to communicate effectively.

Inflight entertainment is, in many ways, the precursor of content marketing. Whether producing lineups of movies and TV shows, publishing magazines or creating music channels, the earliest and best form of custom content was created for the traveller.

Airlines as Content Delivery Systems

Airlines are content providers. Think of a flight as an immersive media experience.

Once you have bought your ticket, cleared security and are safely strapped in to your seat, the small screen in front of you is the dominant experience for the rest of your long-haul flight.

There is no better place for content marketing at its most powerful and resonant than on an airplane. But what’s essential is seamless integration between the airline’s marketing and communications voice, and how it talks to passengers on the seatback.

Airlines need to step away from ops and engineering challenges (and pricing) and take a closer look at how they present, package and promote their entertainment on board.

“ The way we use magazines and interact with them is completely differ-ent from the way we use and interact with the internet... In this case, readers connect through the pages of the magazine.” – Samir Husni, “Mr. Magazine” sprk.sh/husni

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“ Airlines need to move from the business of only putting movies on planes into providing a rich branded content experience for passengers.” – Anthony van Someren

Events as Content

In a connected world, face-to-face events have become more popular than ever. Even as technology has made it easier to connect with colleagues and peers around the world, our thirst for real-world interactions remains powerful (which isn’t bad news for the travel industry). We believe the conversation around these events should start well before the convention hall doors open and continue when the lights go out. In fact, it should never stop.

A conference is more than a conference. It’s a community. And the best way to serve and extend that community is through content – before, during and after the event. Read more at events.sparksheet.com

Print is Not Dead

With online content and digital toys aplenty, the simplicity and tangibility of print somehow seems new and exciting again, with some marketers even speaking of print as a “new” form of communication in their marketing mix.

Read more at: sprk.sh/contentrevolution

Content doesn’t care about platform. It is agnostic. Just like your audience. They don’t care. They just want to be served conveniently.

ABasu@spafax_arjun

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Engaging the Transumer

Tran-sum-er (noun)1. A consumer in transit. A consumer on the go. 2. A citizen of the world. Or at least, of airports. Or hotel rooms. Or the travel “headspace.”

Read more at: sprk.sh/thetransumer

“ There is wisdom in that cabin. And a smart airline will try to figure out how to get that wisdom out of it.” – Jeff Jarvis sprk.sh/jarvis

A Dispatch from AirworldIt sounds a bit ridiculous, but many frequent travellers I know tell stories about the powerful loyalties they’ve developed to goods and services while travelling. Take the emotional rush I get drinking a French 75 cocktail; it’s not just the champagne bubbles or the memory of the silver fox who once ordered one for me at a Lower East Side speakeasy, but an alchemic memory of both. These strong loyalties and emotions help set the Transumer apart from the jet-setting shopper.

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The Spafax Journey Cycle

The Journey Cycle is the linked system of experiences that takes place at every step of a customer’s contact with an airline brand. It’s the connection between the real-time activity of travel with the planning or ideas that inspired it: the purchasing of flights, of products, the information, communication and entertainment on board. It’s the time spent at the destination and the memories that accompany you on the return.

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Email

Websites

BrandContent

Ecosystem

Apps

PrintIn-�ight

Entertainment

Building Brands

The 21st century brand has its own coherent content ecosystem. Each and every part of the messaging that reaches the consumer must come from the same place in terms of tone, quality and meaning. What changes is the context in which the consumer engages with a brand. A smart content strategy, then, is all about using the right platforms to connect with the right people wherever they may be.

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We are living in a world where media outlets are becoming more like brands and brands are becoming more like media.While content creators are experimenting with new business models and digital platforms, businesses are using content to tell their stories, engage people and make money. A brand is the idea behind anything: A company, a country, a person. It’s not a slogan or a catchphrase. It’s more than just words. It’s more than just a story. It’s a voice. And that voice should speak with customers wherever they are.

Read more at: sprk.sh/contentrevolution

Email

Websites

BrandContent

Ecosystem

Apps

PrintIn-�ight

Entertainment

“ Branded anything is fine, as long as it’s backed by substance, and ‘branding’ as a purpose does not subordinate the hard and simple work of earning a good reputation.” – Doc Searls sprk.sh/searls

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Print in Digital ClothingBy Charles Lim, Digital Director

The mentality of most magazine apps seems to be, “Let’s make it look just like print.” After all, a tablet is roughly the same size and thickness as a print magazine, so people will use it the same way, right?

Wrong.

Technology changes the way we use things. Think about the evolution of the calendar. A printed calendar typically consists of 12 pages: New month, new page, new cute kitten image.

Now take that static interface and translate it to a digital device. On a dynamic interface, time can be represented in a variety of ways and the content can be manipulated to suit whatever you’re interested in at that moment.

The goal of designing magazines for the screen should be to improve the content experience even if it means breaking some of the rules of print.

While the print reader is forced to move from issue to issue, page to page, column of text to column of text – next, next, next – the digital reader scrolls through at her own pace and can fly off to anywhere she pleases.

The “linear to web” shift that we saw with calendars hasn’t happened yet with content, and won’t happen until we rethink the idea of “next.”

From radio to TV to print, the old media paradigm is all about one thing (program, ad, article) leading to another. But the web experience isn’t linear. Instead of a single thread of content it’s, well, a web.

It’s time to focus on the content experience regardless of the medium or platform. Don’t try to make the web look like print, just because you can.

Designing Across Platforms

Read more at: sprk.sh/designcode

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“ Content informs design; design without content is decoration.” – Jeffrey Zeldman sprk.sh/zeldman

Responsive Design

At Spafax, we’re big believers in responsive design, a web design philosophy that ensures that content works on a variety of screen sizes, from the smartphone in your pocket to the HD TV in your living room. Today’s customers want to con-sume entertainment on their own devices, meaning we need to create portals that work across platforms in-flight and on the ground.

It allows publishers to be multiplatform without sacrificing content or redesigning from the ground up every time a new device comes out.

We first adopted this approach last year with Sparksheet, and haven’t looked back. For brands that want to reach the on-the-go consumer wherever they may be, no matter what device they’re on, it’s a no-brainer.

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Empowering Community

Who Controls The Message?By David Meerman Scott, Sparksheet Contributor

Companies are terrified of “losing control” of their brand messaging. But they lost it a long time ago. And that’s a good thing. Because it means companies are now free to harness the power of the world to get their message out – meaning getting consumers to do the work for them.

With the rise of social media, message control is firmly in the hands of consumers. For decades, companies have left messaging to a handful of authorized and highly trained spokespeople, such as their public relations director and their CEO.

Brands have used one-way communications – mostly advertising and press releases – to issue formal announcements and have generally forbidden rank- and-file employees from saying anything at all. Social media tools have enabled anybody (company insiders as well as customers and critics) to say anything about a brand. Yet, many organizations persist in the old command-and-control methods of the past.

What works online is creating our own content – content that people want to share. And we should be encouraging our employees, customers and other interested stakeholders to tell our stories and spread our ideas. We should be celebrating blogs, forums and the tools of social media, not clamping down on them.

We must admit that we no longer control the sales process. We can depend on million-dollar direct-mail campaigns that target top sales prospects, big-budget advertisements that cast too wide a net and message-driven PR campaigns directed at media insiders whose audience is shrinking by the day. Or we can try something that might actually work.

Read more at: sprk.sh/dmscott

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“ Getting a handle on your community and understanding how you can better serve their needs is a big challenge for any kind of content creator today.” – Nora Young sprk.sh/young

“ It’s great to see airlines embracing social media. But it’s time to realize that your airplanes are social media with the ability to convert strangers into travel mates and frequent flyers into loyal customers.” – Jay Vidyarthi sprk.sh/vidyarthi

“ The internet is a word of mouth machine. Once brands let the people formerly known as the customer base into the tent, they have the benefit of their knowledge, their pas-sion, their ideas, and especially, their communities. And these possibilities are staggering.” – Bob Garfield sprk.sh/garfield

“ Airports are more than cities. They are communities.” – Arjun Basu sprk.sh/contentrevolution

“ C-suite executives who engage in social media are perceived to be better leaders.” – Anita Windisman sprk.sh/windisman

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Talking Travel and Digital with Sir Martin Sorrell

As CEO of WPP Group, Sir Martin Sorrell is known for his predictions about the future of media. Here is an excerpt from his conversations with Sparksheet.

Q. As someone who spends a lot of time on the road, what do you look for in a travel brand?

A. If you’re talking about airlines, research shows that the most critical thing is how you’re received at the check-in desk and upon boarding the plane. In my opinion, the devil’s in the details. It’s not the big stuff. What turns me on is when people are attentive and welcoming. I get the impression that the major airlines see investment in the soft touches – video, food, etc. – as relatively unimportant, but I think it makes a hell of a difference.

Q. Tell me about the increasing importance of data in the advertising world. Is that entirely due to digital?

A. No, not entirely due to digital. It dates back to the old quote by John Wanamaker or Lord Leverhulme or the other 25,000 people who are claimed to have said, “I know half my advertising spend is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” Data was important well before the digital age. But with the advent of online media and cable and IPTV, people are becoming more concerned about measurement and ROI. And the fact is that we now have the ability to measure in ways we didn’t before.

Read more at: sprk.sh/sorrell

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When Sparksheet launched in the summer of 2009, our goal was simple. We wanted to create a space where travel, media and marketing professionals could explore the ongoing disruption of their industries, and where the many “good ideas” incubating within the Spafax universe could take shape. The world was changing in unexpected ways, the digital revolution had tipped, and it seemed like a good time to take a step back and have an open, honest conversation about where things were headed. This was going to be more than a corporate blog. We wanted to share some of the ideas that really drove Spafax. And still do.

As award-winning editors, designers, developers and community managers, our role is curatorial. We strive to bring a clear-eyed journalistic perspective to the conversation – a conversation that, more than three years later, we feel is more important than ever.

Like what you see in this magazine? For more good ideas, join us at sparksheet.com.

Good ideas about content, media and marketing