The humble rideshare trip has officially entered its luxury-era branding arc. According to Jordan Glassberg, vice president of partnerships and loyalty at Lyft, your ride to the airport is no longer just a ride. It is a “travel ribbon.” Your dinner reservation is a “moment.” Your Lyft account is becoming a loyalty wallet with tires.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, media buyers are being asked to think deeply about whether a consumer headed to a steakhouse should see an ad for wine, luggage or perhaps existential fulfillment itself.
Speaking with Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein ahead of Beet.TV’s “Flight to Cannes” with Kinective Media by United Airlines, Glassberg laid out Lyft’s expanding vision for travel, commerce and advertising.
“Lyft shows up, I would say, differently for every ride,” Glassberg said. “An everyday ride could be a ride to work, an everyday ride could be a ride to brunch with friends on a Sunday.”
This is the sort of sentence that makes agency strategists nod thoughtfully while ordinary humans quietly wonder if they’re being psychoanalyzed for ordering a car to eggs Benedict.
Still, Glassberg’s broader point is serious. Lyft wants to distinguish between casual transportation and what he called “high-stakes travel instances,” especially airport rides where being late can mean missing a flight.
“And the worst-case scenario, if you’re too late, you could potentially miss your flight,” he said. “So, that’s something that we’re super thoughtful of.”
MileagePlus meets mileage-plus-more-marketing
A major part of that strategy is Lyft’s partnership with United Airlines MileagePlus. Customers can already link their Lyft and MileagePlus accounts to earn airline miles on rides. Now, they can also use those miles to pay for rides, creating what Glassberg called an “earn-and-burn activity” inside the ecosystem.
Translation: the ride to the airport can now be funded by the airport.
Glassberg framed the partnership as part of a larger push toward utility-driven commerce instead of random ad bombardment.
“I think showing up in a way that is additive to that moment, not just an add, but actually giving the customer utility, that’s a huge way that we’re looking to show up,” he said.
To be fair, this is a more elegant pitch than the traditional advertising model, which often boils down to: “You searched for loafers once, so now every device you own will be haunted by loafers until the end of time.”
The “travel ribbon” enters the chat
Glassberg also argued consumers don’t think about travel in disconnected silos.
“A customer doesn’t think of, ‘I have my rideshare ride, and then I have my flight, and then I have my hotel,’” he said. “They think of that whole travel arc. They think of the travel ribbon on the day of travel.”
Somewhere, a PowerPoint designer just added “travel ribbon” to a slide with glowing gradients and a stock photo of someone laughing alone in an airport lounge.
Still, the concept reflects a growing push across travel media and loyalty programs to stitch together fragmented parts of the consumer journey. Lyft says it is working with airline, hotel and food delivery partners to make those experiences more seamless.
Lyft Ads wants to know where you’re going
Glassberg also discussed the company’s growing ad business, Lyft Ads, which aims to move beyond awareness campaigns toward measurable outcomes.
“We’re no longer just paying for impressions or awareness,” he said. “We’re really thinking about kind of the full funnel of it all.”
The pitch to marketers is simple enough: Lyft knows not only what consumers may be watching, but potentially where they are headed. That could include airports, concerts or “that hard-to-get reservation” Glassberg referenced repeatedly like a man determined to remind Cannes attendees he absolutely knows people at Carbone.
“Being able to know where that person’s going, have a captive audience, and then being able to potentially shape the outcome or the next action,” he said, “I think that’s really powerful.”
For media buyers, that kind of location-driven intent data sounds like performance marketing gold. For consumers, it is yet another reminder that the apps know everything now, including apparently whether your Saturday night dinner reservation required three weeks of pleading on Resy.
You’re watching “The “Flight to Cannes”: How Passion and Purpose Fuels Travel and Media Impact, a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by Kinective Media by United Airlines. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
