As the chief marketing officer of a company that just turned 100, Alicia Tillman is tasked with looking forward to the next 100 years of Delta Air Lines.
The company sees the next century as a balance of improving human experiences through evolutions in technology, strategic partnerships and keeping the brand relevant in the culture, where consumers spend their time. The brand kicked off its 100th year at CES with a star-studded keynote at The Sphere, where they highlighted partnerships with Uber and YouTube.
“Our presentation at CES was really about how technology is enriching the human experience today and what it’s going to look like tomorrow,” says Tillman. “There is always something new that is challenging the way that we live and we work and we think and how we buy. Technology often drives our beliefs in one brand over the other. Our message at CES is set to transform the world and enhance our human experience on some level by technology.”
The human experience is tied into culture. As the brand looks to connect with consumers in the culture, they are sponsoring numerous sports teams including being the official airline of both the National Women’s Soccer League and the Women’s National Basketball Association.
Delta recently found that 42% of WNBA fans have taken at least one round trip flight in the last 12 months. So the airline recently teamed with WNBA on Power Forward, which highlights three icons of women’s basketball – Nneka Ogwumike, Breanna Stewart and Cameron Brink. The three-part series highlights the players’ journey to success.
“We’ve got a 100-year-old brand, and between both WNBA and NWSL, in many ways, these leagues are very much still in their infancy,” says Tillman. “Helping to put 100 years of really significant brand equity is only going to help lift their brand awareness. There’s such a tremendous amount of shared values that exists between both leagues, WNBA and NWSL. Our commitment to lifting people up and getting them to where they want to go has always been a very core part of Delta’s values.”
Brand Innovators will be hosting a Marketing Innovation Summit at Delta’s headquarters in Atlanta on October 20th. We caught up with Tillman from her office in Atlanta to discuss showing up in culture, AI and how the brand is navigating economic uncertainty. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about why it’s important as a brand to show up in these cultural moments where consumers are spending their time?
Every human has so many different facets. They may be a business professional during the week and during their free time they are consumers of sports and arts and music. When we look at WNBA fans, 42% of WNBA fans have taken at least one round trip flight in the last 12 months. That’s a pretty significant percentage: nearly half of the traveling population are fans of the WNBA.
We study consumers so that we can be the best version of ourselves to remain relevant in the minds of our customers. Consumers today are very interested in brands that have multiple touch points in their lives. While someone may fly Delta primarily for work, if they’re spending their leisure time at a WNBA game, it is positive to see us there too. If that can be a connected part of their life’s journey, then that helps to drive even stronger loyalty and brand attachment over time.
You just celebrated 100 years this year. Tell me how it’s going and what this means to the brand and to the consumers and your audience.
How does technology help to enhance the way that we deliver an improved and highly relevant and personalized experience such as Delta Concierge, which in essence, looks to anticipate how to make the traveling experience more seamless, more efficient, more calm? Eve, our fictitious character, but that of one that we can very much relate to in terms of the experience of actually going on a trip and all the things that often are stressful that we do think technology can help to support. Our goal is to demonstrate our brand attributes, which is a welcoming, very elevated, caring, empathetic style of service.
What does innovation look like in 2025 for travel?
Personalization still prevails. What is at the core of any successful experience with a brand, it’s how personalized that experience is. That comes in many forms. It’s how well you greet and engage your customers and how well you help to solve problems for them or unlock opportunities. The more we are investing in that personalized servicing experience, the better. We have made significant strides in our app in particular. When we look at our various customer segments – business travelers and Gen Z for instance – business travelers favor technology because it just helps them be efficient. Gen Z has grown up in a technology-led world.
The other thing is increased loyalty. How do we drive deeper loyalty, deeper engagement? We’ve made a lot of advancements in terms of additional partnerships that we’re bringing on board. We introduced Uber, an ability to both earn and redeem with Uber. We’ve recognized through our partnership that over 15% of all Uber transactions originate from an airport. Making sure that’s an integrated part of what we offer and how we operate. Our YouTube partnership, which will come online in the fall, is a way for us to bring entertainment and content in an exclusive sense on board to our customers.
We’re making advancements from a culinary perspective with the introduction of Shake Shack on board, as well as Taittinger Champagne. We’ve got Missoni Bedding in Delta One on board.
How do we continue to enhance these experiential pieces? Be that through partnership or be that through all of the details that really define the end-to-end experience with our customers.
How are you working with AI?
From a customer perspective, there’s really two use cases – one is digital, using it first and foremost from a customer servicing perspective. We deploy AI to help support customers quickly and efficiently with some of the more common types of challenges while they’re on their journey. We’re using it from a customer servicing perspective. The other opportunity is from a pricing perspective. We are starting to think about how we deploy it when it comes to managing the overall pricing for various routes.
On the marketing side, we are beginning to deploy it on measurement to look at the overall ROI of marketing spend. We partnered with Alembic, which is a company that is powered by Nvidia’s supercomputer, that helps measure above the line types of brand investments, which have historically been very difficult to measure. If I’m running a spot during the Olympics, were there any actions that came from consumers after seeing that investment in media? Did they go to the website? Did they purchase a ticket? We ran this pilot with The Olympics last summer to understand the correlation of our campaigns associated with Team USA on cash sales.
There were over 20 million sales that resulted from exposure to the messaging that we were putting out there during The Olympics. We saw that over half of these sales were from non-digital TV exposure. To be able to deploy AI in this manner and have a near real-time analysis of the effect is quite revolutionary.
As a brand you’re navigating tariffs and economic downturn?
There’s not an industry that’s out there that is not needing to navigate through a tremendous amount of uncertainty right now. Everybody is in it. We’re working with each other, having the necessary conversations with the administration about what we believe the impact of tariffs and the economic uncertainty overall is going to have on commercial aviation. Travel is a leading economic indicator. When travel’s going well, the economy typically is as well and vice versa. Being experts in this space, we have a definite point of view and a fair basis of insights to share to help the administration best figure out how to make decisions and navigate through this period.
From a marketing standpoint, the best thing that you can do as a brand during periods of uncertainty is stay true to what you’re there to deliver. How do we get people to where they need to be, clean, safe, on time with bags. That’s our operating philosophy – with safety first. We are relentlessly, tirelessly focused on that.
Delta was recognized as one of the 50 most community-minded companies in the U.S. for the eighth year in a row. What is driving this?
This is all about how much community engagement is embedded into our company’s DNA.
We celebrate it because we just did a digital and broadcast spot to talk about our work in the communities. We showed a flight attendant doing her work at Delta. That is one of just countless stories we have. We’ve always had this culture at Delta that when you are at the level of impact in servicing over 500,000 customers a day, stepping on board one of our aircraft is unbelievable.
The amount of people that we service on a daily basis – when you have that level of impact in society, there’s just this natural authenticity and belief that we all share that you’ve got to equally give back to the communities in which you live, work and serve. That’s embedded into the DNA of Delta people.
