LATAM Goes Green: Switches to Sustainable Video Advertising

South American carrier LATAM Airlines has partnered with tech company SeenThis to improve the efficiency of its digital advertising and slash unnecessary emissions.

Flights aren’t the only contributors to the carbon footprint of airlines. As with other industries, their digital advertising can also be carbon-intensive, requiring millions of servers to conduct real-time bidding, cloud computing, and machine learning.

LATAM A320 / Photo: Miguel Lagoa/Shutterstock

One million impressions of a single video ad can generate the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as a roundtrip flight from Boston to London, according to data from Scope3, a company measuring the end-to-end emissions of digital advertising.

However, a new adaptive streaming technology from SeenThis cuts the amount of data used by digital advertisements while simultaneously making them more interactive, faster, and more reliable for users with poor connections. LATAM Airlines, the largest carrier in South America, has now adopted its streaming solution.

Static Banners: a thing of the past

LATAM predominantly used static banner ads with binary video files, with its high-quality video content reserved for expensive video inventory placements.

With SeenThis’s technology, LATAM can now run interactive ads with multimedia features, including video, audio, and animation, at comparable prices to static display ads. Manuel Breve, LATAM’s team lead for paid search and marketing technology, described the savings as “mind-blowing for us.”

For example, an online advertisement targeting customers interested in traveling to South America can include multiple clickable destinations within the same display. When the customer selects their chosen destination, they’re redirected to a landing page on the LATAM website showing flights for that specific country and available travel dates.

Photo: Courtesy of Pawel Czerwinski / Unsplash

The ads are also dynamic, displaying distinct art within the video for different routes and reflecting changing ticket prices. This dynamic art loads immediately, just as it would for regular banner ads.

Despite all the interactivity, SeenThis-enabled ads are more sustainable. These ads stream only when someone is actively watching them and pause when they’re no longer in view, resulting in less data and energy usage and less media waste.

SeenThis’s solution also sends data in “micro fragments” directly to the user’s device, resulting in a seamless viewing experience, even for people with poor internet connections.

Since partnering with SeenThis for its digital advertising last year, LATAM has cut its customer acquisition costs by up to 83% and reduced its data use by around one-quarter. That’s led to about 14 tons of carbon savings.

LATAM’s marketing technology team lead, Manuel Breve, believes this new technology is “truly amazing” and admits being “really excited” to partner with SeenThis. According to Breve, the airline is committed to expanding its collaboration with SeenThis in 2023. “We will continue to optimize our media spending towards more sustainable options and, at the same time, improve ROI and performance.”

Photo: Courtesy of LATAM

Likewise, Jesper Benon, chief executive at SeenThis, noted, “With indirect emissions stemming from digital advertising, it’s important we act now; implementing innovative solutions. Our technology loads instantly and minimizes unnecessary data transfer. This leads to a reduction in the environmental impact of digital content versus traditional video ad serving technology.”

LATAM Airlines was recently named the fifth most sustainable airline in the world in Standard and Poor’s 2023 Corporate Sustainability Assessment. It was joined by Taiwanese carriers China Airlines, EVA Air, Japanese carriers Japan Airlines (JAL), and All Nippon Airways (ANA).