Wait, What? United is a Cool Brand?

The airline is taking chances on social media as it tries to change how consumers see it. So far, I’d say the approach is working.

Dear readers,

Something weird is happening at United Airlines when it comes to how customers interact with the brand online.

United, which is very familiar with being the main character on social media,¹ might now be the coolest airline online.

Granted, it’s a low bar. Many premium airlines (Emirates and Singapore among them) take what I consider a hands-off and outdated (or is it stuffy?) approach to social media engagement. United takes a different tack, giving wide latitude to the 45 employees on its brand marketing team to produce sticky content that connects with Gen Z and anyone who likes a cheeky, creative and relevant brand.

“We are really trend-driven,” Maggie Schmerin, United’s chief advertising officer, told me in an interview. “We feel strongly that for a brand in 2026 to be relevant, you really have to be tapped into culture.”

The videos United makes to tease and announce new routes show its commitment to cool.² The airline began producing them just after the pandemic to promote its strategy to fly to places U.S. carriers rarely reach, such as Ulaanbaatar, and Kaohsiung. From the beginning, the teaser videos have been innovative, filled with subtle but guessable clues about new markets the airline would announce the next day.

Still, by brand marketing standards, they were simple. You probably remember this one from a few years ago, starring network guru Patrick Quayle and filmed on an airplane. This year’s teaser — to announce United’s new destinations like Catania, Ibiza, Ljubljana, Valencia, Luxembourg, and Marseille — is way bigger and better, with actors, a concept, and many nods to pop culture.

I love my subscribers, but most of you aren’t the target audience for these teasers. This is more for people who love popular culture but perhaps find air travel intimidating.

“There were elements of ‘Survivor’ in there, and elements of ‘Love Island,’” Schmerin said. “Even the fact that we did it in a cottage was in honor of ‘Heated Rivalry’ — one of the biggest shows on TV this year that had cottage as a major plot point.”

As a proponent of brand marketing and advertising, I like United’s approach. No airline can succeed without getting the basics right, but brand is important too. I’m always surprised when certain carriers ignore how passengers feel about their brands, perhaps believing (as a certain former CCO used to say) that the network is the product.

When a carrier can spend the time and money to make its brand stand out, I think that’s an advantage in any competitive market, including contested one-stop connections. Judging by how many insiders at other airlines have told me they’re impressed by — and sometimes jealous of — United’s plucky social media presence, I’d say United is doing it right.

This has been a long road

It has not always been like this at United.

Schmerin and her deputy Meg Mitchell, United’s global creative director, joined in 2017, the same year the infamous Dr. Dao was dragged off an airplane at O’Hare. Back then, United was simply trying to communicate on social media that it didn’t suck as much as some consumers thought.³

“If you went back and looked at a word cloud to find the most popular words that United Airlines used on social media a decade ago, you would see a lot of words like, ‘sorry’ and ‘apologize’,” Schmerin said. “Social media was primarily a customer service channel. We came in and said, ‘That’s important too. We totally appreciate that.’ Oftentimes, in their moment of need, social is the fastest place to help someone. But this is also the place where we can show people that we’re more than just this metal tube getting you from point A to point B.”

United improved its customer satisfaction scores under Oscar Munoz and then-president Scott Kirby between 2017 and 2020. But Schmerin and Mitchell understood that they couldn’t fully change consumer sentiment so quickly, because there’s usually a lag between when an airline improves and when people understand it has improved.

Plus, while the experience was better, United still didn’t have much to promote. The airline had yet to announce many of its ambitious passenger experience plans, including in-seat screens, Starlink, and retrofitted interiors. So just as network planners return to their strongest markets when they need their mojo back, Schmerin and Mitchell examined what they had inherited to find their strongest assets. They went with sports sponsorships.

“We have dozens of those, and we said, ‘let’s start having fun in the comment section,’” Schmerin said. “We fly these teams. We are fans of these teams, and when you get some small wins like that, and you’re able to shop that around the halls at United and say, ‘this is what we’re after,’ you inspire people. I think they say, ‘OK, I can see where we want to go,’ and you just build up from there.”

By 2019, United was celebrating the Chicago Bears’ 100th anniversary by dressing the replica dinosaur in O’Hare’s Terminal 1 in a giant Bears jersey. It even temporarily added the Bears’ colors and font to gate numbers at the airport.

Perhaps that stuff changed how customers saw the brand, but in those early years, Schmerin and Mitchell said they had other priorities too. Yes, they wanted small wins to earn buy-in from high-level executives who controlled budgets, but they also wanted to sway all employees and get them excited about working for an airline on the upswing.

“We really feel strongly that people need to understand where we’re going, so they can help advocate for us, and they can understand, ‘OK, this is the type of brand that we want to be,”’ Schmerin said.

United does things its way

Since then, the team has probably had enough success that they don’t need to do as much lobbying. Still, Schmerin and Mitchell meet regularly with employee groups to screen upcoming television advertisements, social media campaigns, and billboards, and to talk about future plans. They don’t want to hide anything.

“I think there’s a feeling that social media or marketing is secretive,” Schmerin said. [Executives say,] ‘you’ll see it when you see it on TV or when it’s on social media.’ We take the exact opposite approach.”

They now have an advocate at the very top: Scott Kirby. United’s CEO has told me for years he tries to set a tone for the airline without micromanaging. The advertising team has noted that Kirby is a deeply competitive man who wants to be the best at everything, including brand positioning.

“Scott always talks about the biggest and best airline in the history of aviation, and he started to add biggest, best, and coolest airline in the history of aviation,” Mitchell said.

Kirby sets the tone in two other ways. First, he doesn’t fear mistakes as much as many CEOs, believing United should take chances so long as it can recover if things go wrong. As other brands have learned, social media teams occasionally misread what the internet wants, leading to major drama and a temporary hit to the brand. (Just ask McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski).⁴

Second, Kirby wants to zig when others zag. In the Jeff Smisek era, which ended in 2015, United was best known for copying Delta. One example: After Delta changed how it awarded frequent flyer miles, United did the same.

These days, United copies little. Rather than mimic Delta’s approach to advertising, with its slick commercials featuring famous actors like Viola Davis and Donald Sutherland, United acts more like an upstart trying to break through without spending much money. Even when United is on TV, it often tries to create buzz at what I suspect is a fraction of Delta’s budget.⁵

Social media, though, is where United really shines. It meets the cool people where they are, often on TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit.

“We’ll post in there and say, ‘All right, Reddit, go do your thing,’” Mitchell said. “People on Reddit want to go deep, and they will spend hours and hours trying to decode everything in there.”

That kind of engagement is exactly what a consumer-facing brand wants.

Photo by David Syphers on Unsplash

How does United measure ROI on social media?

Frankly, it doesn’t matter.

Perhaps that’s a little flippant, but United is a Fortune 100 company that made almost $60 billion in operating revenue last year. Even its biggest-budget social media shoots, like the one in the Canadian cabin, are a rounding error on the annual budget.

“This is incredibly efficient marketing and social media for us,” Schmerin said. “We also put some paid dollars behind it on social media, but we only have that reveal video. It makes sense to really promote it for 24 hours. It’s about being as impactful as we can by making really good content that hopefully takes off organically.”

Brands can measure some social media metrics, including video completion rates, shares, and engagement.⁶ But if the goal is to measure how many viewers buy a ticket within a year, that’s nearly impossible.

Increasingly, though, United’s bean-counters aren’t stressing the small stuff. Just as CFO Mike Leskinen said he can’t measure exactly how much more revenue United captures by spending more on chicken, I don’t think anyone at United cares exactly how many incremental passengers the airline attracts with a viral video.

If people beyond the insular aviation world are talking about an airline’s social media content, Schmerin and Mitchell say they know it’s working.

“I know that we have done something special when we break through outside of just the biggest aviation enthusiasts,” Schmerin said. “When Meg’s getting texts or people are sending me a text that normally wouldn’t hear about our news, that’s when we know that we’ve done something — whether it’s jumping on a trend with a popular show and making a series of memes, or these route videos.”

There’s another important target segment. Airlines measure employee engagement in more sophisticated ways, but executives often have a shorthand way to gauge how much their workers like their jobs: the swag they wear. I’ve noticed how Delta employees — “the airline that puts the cult in culture,” as a former employee says — love wearing hats and shirts with the Widget branding.

I haven’t seen as many United employees wearing the airline’s logo. Who would want to be accosted by angry customers who had a bad experience with their employer?

The advertising team is trying to reverse that. “Scott says all the time he wants people to go to the grocery store wearing a United Airlines T-shirt,” Schmerin said.

Judging how many employees watch, like, and share social media is just about impossible, Schmerin said, but the team tries to measure vibes.

“Just scanning our own social feeds, and seeing the number of employees that share these videos and repost them is something that is really important to us,” she said. “We want to develop content that employees are proud of and excited about.”

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back next week with some non-United content. Also, on Monday and Tuesday, I’ll be in Dallas/Fort Worth for the Oneworld Loyalty Summit. I’m being paid to appear on stage.

1. For different reasons, of course. Breaking guitars and inspiring a hit song; calling security on one of its own customers before dragging him off the plane.

2. I pointed out that the vast majority of United’s customers never will fly on these new routes and asked why the airline spends a good portion of its budget on these videos, rather than something that highlights the passenger experience. Schmerin said (correctly, I think) that what United is really selling is possibilities. “People love wanderlust and thinking about where they might use their United Miles, or might one day go,” she said.

3. I know some of you think I’m overly favorable to United. I don’t think that’s a fair characterization. I like well-run airlines that are (relatively) free of drama. United wasn’t that airline in 2017, and I hit it hard. If you want confirmation of that, just ask Schmerin. She started as director of brand public relations, and she used to have a lot of contact with angry journalists, including me.

4. Hey, at least Kempczinski tried. Could you imagine Robert Isom talking on camera while eating a bite of American’s new inflight catering? How I’d love to see that.

5. United’s Super Bowl ads the last few years are a great example. Some brands pay as much as $10 million for one national spot. This past February, United bought an ad to highlight its Starlink internet. But it only aired it in seven markets, including five small ones — Cincinnati, Cleveland, Colorado Springs, Indianapolis and Kansas City. The airline heavily promoted its relatively low-budget commercial on the internet, as it sought to create that illusion that it had bought a “real” Super Bowl ad.

6. All companies cherry-pick their best data to share with you. But United said its route teaser video had 1.5 more shares this year on Instagram than in 2025. On Facebook, its share rate was 2.5 times higher, while the engagement rate was two times higher.