The Future of Travel Media: Insights from ReachTV’s CEO Lynnwood Bibbens

Welcome back to Market Movers.

The opening bell.

I'm Vince Molinari, CEO and founder of FinTech TV.

I'm joined today by another CEO and founder, Lynn Wood Bibbins from Reach TV.

Reach TV is the largest airport television network and ad-free, ad-supported streaming TV network targeting travelers.

It is distributed across more than 2400 gates in over 90 commercial airports, 2500 venues, and streams into over 500,000 hotel rooms across North America, reaching over 50 million viewers monthly.

Man, oh man, Lynnwood, it is great to have you back.

I love that read in.

It just puts it all in place, and I am so proud to be a partner with Reach TV and this magnificent show that we created together.

So always a thrill to have you in.

Yes, it's always great to be here and you know it's like we talk so much we almost forget sometimes what we're doing together and how impactful it is on people traveling.

It's something that they look forward to and something that they can really.

Um, take those sound bites into meetings as more and more people are traveling and I'm proud of what we, what we're already building together.

Well, and I have to reflect again because you're doing that read in of the Hey, hey, this is pretty amazing.

I want to meet this guy.

Oh, he's already my partner.

So super, super proud and thank you.

Hey, I wanted to jump in on a bit of an update when we talk about the next, next things that are going on at Reach TV.

Tell me about Reach TV and what's going on with Unblocked.

So right now, I mean, our focus has been in the last 18 months, 24 months has really been.

What's the next 5 years, right?

And what do we what do we have to do to get to that place?

And it was really about investment, so we made a lot of strategic investments to unlock the things that we knew were right.

We have been bought by from an advertising perspective, all the TV and video buyers, but for a classification reason we were put into this out of home bucket.

That had never bought sports and never bought any of that.

So we were in this hybrid space.

So what we did was worked with Nielsen, worked with others on how do we change that classification, what was the work we needed to do, what was the investments we needed to make.

And earlier this year at our upfront we announced that we were moving out of right here at the New York Stock Exchange.

We are moving away from digital PlaySpace or digital home to digital video where we were bought with CTV, cable.

Television, video, mobile, social, and we are also going to use GRPs, which is what most TV buyers are used to buying.

So that unlock was announced in April and is official live now.

Congratulations.

4 days ago.

Yes, well done.

Yeah, that was a big that was one of our biggest unlocks because it took our inventory from being in a pool of about $3 billion in that total pool to $180 billion.

So.

So that obviously is an opportunity for us now to go and the second part of that unlock was, well, where does those dollars reside?

You've unlocked it, but where's who actually controls those dollars and programmatically the number one is trade desk.

So what we did then was take the what we were doing with Nielsen, brought it over to trade desk, even though it wasn't implemented yet and it wasn't live, but Trade Desk said was.

We believe in what you're doing and what your product is, so why don't we create through a deal ID all the buyers can see your inventory right from the beginning.

So we just finished that unlock, and that is now live and we've already started transacting on it.

Some of our biggest brands are now buying us programmatically through Trade Desk.

Unawaited those same buyers couldn't share our inventory 6 months ago, 3 months ago, 2 months ago, visibility and having the executable executable component through Trade Desk.

That's amazing.

So and then after Trade Desk what we also decided was we had a lot of first party data which we can get into in a minute, but was this is my interview.

Don't.

But what was also very important for us is really to know our customers.

We are maniacs around surveys, understanding what people want to see, what they're watching, what's important to them, and also we want to know more about them.

So we took all the data that we had and we matched it with TransUnion so that we can get all these other identifiers and other things so that we can really understand who our audience is.

So we've now.

I've gone from added TransUnion IDs along with our Reach TV IDs.

We've earned Trade Desk and now we're part of Nielsen 1.

So those are our big 3 unlocks and then understatement the 1st 3 minutes we got Tran TransUnion Nielsen Trask.

Yes, so you teed me up with the Segway a minute ago.

Let's talk about first party data and what the value of that and what you're doing.

I mean, I think now that we've moved over to our TV video platform and everybody can buy us, what that really is is cross platform measurement and touch points.

How can you talk to the audience?

So we've taken it and said, let's go backwards, guys.

Forget about all the locations.

Let's talk about who we are serving.

Let's start with the audience.

So we already had collected over 500 million devices that we had opted in.

And then it was matching that with TransUnion that gave us to the home.

Now we have both the Reach TV ID, the TransUnion ID.

Now we're matching those three things.

Then we started adding in POS data.

Then we started adding in loyalty data.

Then we started adding parking data.

So you start to look at this whole ecosystem and you have all this data.

Now, now you can actually look at the audience first.

So we don't want to talk to Gen Z, don't want to talk to this, whoever the target audience is for our brands, for our content, we then build it from there.

So we're starting audience first.

And then dis distribution out. that's led to some amazing things where other airlines, hotels, everybody is now partnering with us with the first party data and it's allowing us the data platform called TravelSync 365.

It's so we can talk to travelers 365 days a year.

So it allows us to talk to travelers whereverwhere they're going and our secret sauce, which is not a secret anymore, is that we also Acquired a platform that allows us.

It was already geo fenced over 20 million locations.

So now I can tell you to our audience goes to Kroger's, goes to a golf shop, goes to Starbucks, right?

For example, golf courses, 38 million people who came to our airport who are opted in have went to golf courses.

So we know we have a heavy golf audience, right?

24 million people a month who come to our airports are also Starbucks.

Go to.

Books, so we now know the data around where our audience goes and what that journey is.

So you know, the travel sync 365 is going to be something that allows people to take a step back and really own the traveler, right?

And that's the case.

Well, you know, a couple of quick observations in true entrepreneurship form you've reverse engineered the category right when you look at audience first.

And having that super rich data sets gives you such an advantage of the signal of who the audience is and really what you should be serving up to them.

So kudos to you and the team to really think about that in a new refreshing way.

And although we're out of time, there's two guys that we might know that might be able to get us another minute out of this.

So let's keep going.

I have to have your prediction as we look forward a little bit.

Tell me what we should be looking at.

Well, I think you're going to see a continued.

Um, two things are really important.

One, sports are still going to lead the way on viewing when it comes to massive ratings.

Our live sports is second to none.

The NFL this year has been on fire, so I mean we're really proud that we've got 5 more years of every single game.

Playoffs in Super Bowl.

That's one.

Number 2, we're seeing everybody going back to work, which, which since 2019, the airport and travel has been still waiting for corporate to come back.

I predict in January and February we start to see the return of corporate travel for the first time in 6 years.

So that is going to change a lot.

It's going to put increased pressure, a ton of traffic coming through the airports, and this year, despite having less people in the international, less people from Canada, we're still up 2.5%.

So people are domestically are flying more and you're starting to see individuals fly more often.

We're starting to get people that are frequent flyers that are 15 times a year, not just the 3 times a year.

So I think those changes are here to stay, and you're going to see it continue.

And if I leave one little quote at the end is, I think the new experience is just being in person.

So that's it.

What is old is new.

You heard it here from Lidwood Bivens, CEO and founder of Reach TV.

Corporate travel coming back in size in 2026. always good to have you.

Thank you.

I appreciate it, my friend.