How Reach TV Brings Streaming And Advertising To America’s Airports
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By Victoria McNally
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If you’ve ever killed time at an airport staring up at the TV mounted to the wall by your gate, then you’ve been part of Reach TV’s audience.
Over the past ten years, Reach TV has more or less cornered the market on in-airport television, a position it solidified after buying the remnants of CNN’s airport network in 2021. The Stagwell-owned streaming network now has screens at 2,400 airport gates and in 500,000 hotel rooms across North America, which together reach more than 51 million travelers a month.
Those screens display a wide range of ad-supported entertainment content, from travel (obviously) to lifestyle and even business news. But – stop me if you’ve heard this one before! – sports content is the crown jewel, both in terms of engagement and advertiser interest.
“Live sports is just what everyone cares about,” said Rachel Jacobson, who took over as Reach TV’s CEO in late April. “Even if you don’t like the sport that’s playing, it’s a distraction.”
This year, Reach TV struck a partnership with Fox Sports to license and air all 104 FIFA World Cup matches live. The company also set up special activations in many host cities, including a 230-inch TV screen with an astroturf-carpeted seating area in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
A bunch of these airports expressed interest in maintaining the experiential displays even though the World Cup is over. “They want people to come earlier,” said Jacobson.
And once they’re there, travelers who are happy and engaged with their immediate surroundings are less likely to mind a long wait time for their flight – and more likely to shop at the airport in the meantime, too.
Now boarding
Speaking of shopping, marketers are especially keen on using Reach TV’s network to connect with travelers who would be unreachable by other television ads while traveling, said Jacobson. With no remote to change the channel (and, in some cases, without reliable Wi-Fi or cellular data), air travelers are about the closest thing to a captive audience advertisers can get.
It also doesn’t hurt that those who travel by air tend to be a more affluent crowd of decision-makers. According to Dave Olesnevich, Reach TV’s COO, this audience is 2.7 times more likely to be traveling for business, and roughly 16% of these folks are in management roles. They also buy luxury goods 25% to 47% more than the general population, which might explain why there are so many high-end retailers at duty-free shops these days.
Reach TV’s client roster spans a wide gamut of industries and verticals, and, like most of the CTV market, those advertisers are increasingly focused on lower-funnel performance. The company offers both national and local ad spots, said Olesnevich, and sells inventory through a combination of direct deals, private marketplaces and auctions via multiple DSPs and SSPs.
To serve those advertisers, Reach TV will also sometimes tailor its programming around major events, like the Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas. That obviously involves customizing the content on its screens at Harry Reid International Airport, but Reach TV also does the same at airports in cities where a lot of conference attendees are flying from, like New York and Los Angeles. (Similarly, Reach TV tends to air its business news between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m., the most common times for business travelers to waiting in a terminal for a flight.)
These choices are guided by data. Reach TV taps a wide range of sources to understand both its audience and their content preferences, including travel data from the TSA across the more than 80 airports Reach TV operates in. There’s also mobile location data, credit bureau data from third-party vendors and ratings from Nielsen and Nielsen One, its cross-platform measurement platform.
Ad effectiveness is typically measured by brand lift and impressions. Although some performance-minded advertisers add QR codes to their creative, Reach TV doesn’t support other forms of shoppable video just yet. Instead, the company gathers man-on-the-street testimonials from travelers about the brands they see on its screens, said Jacobson.
Ready for takeoff
Both Jacobson and Olesnevich – he also joined in April 2026 – are relatively new to Reach TV, but they both have big plans for helping the company grow.
Jacobson, who spent over twenty years in business development at the NBA, wants to foster more partnerships across content programming and advertising, but also with infrastructure providers and TV manufacturers. Her goal is to expand on the success of Reach TV’s World Cup fan zones to increase the company’s overall footprint within airports, which she called a “net new area” for Reach TV.
On the engineering side, Olesnevich, who previously led the product team at The Weather Company, wants to improve Reach TV’s ability to work with first-party data from its clients and also attract new automotive and B2B clients. “The clean rooms of the world are making that super easy to do,” he said.
All of that plumbing is in service of the bet Reach TV is making, which is that as more viewing shifts to streaming, CTV’s most valuable screen isn’t in the living room at all – it’s at the gate.
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