Along with a large selection of popular games, Gladi8tor’s platform offers gaming news, a video channel with e-sports competitions and an onboard digital shop.

Passengers can log into the aircraft’s local network using their own tablet or phone. The platform offers many benefits for airlines: it is more flexible and faster to update than traditional in-flight entertainment systems. At the same time, it provides a platform for advertising.

Triple’s Esports Club venture has been creating content about gaming and e-sports for Gladi8tor’s platform for several years. Gladi8tor approached us with a request to combine different data sources and make them visually accessible. They needed graphs and a dashboard that they could use to improve their platform while also demonstrating its relevance for airlines and advertisers.

The dashboard would display key data metrics, answering questions like: What are people doing and what is the user experience on the platform? What do people click on? Which games are most popular? How many people are logged in during the flight?

Now, using the descriptive dashboard we developed, Gladi8tor is able to improve the user experience for passengers. The dashboard also shows how many ads were viewed, by which people and on which flights. This segmentation allows ads to be displayed in a more targeted way to optimize conversion.

Gladi8tor was keen to use a sales tool to convince new airlines of the potential and commercial value of the platform. To achieve this, we built a predictive dashboard that uses historical data from past flights to predict for future flights which people with a specific gaming profile will download the app and which ads they are interested in. Modeling the data enables us to make targeted predictions about which people will be on a future flight and what the financial value might be when selling ads.

To generate descriptive and predictive dashboards, we use a variety of different data sources. These are linked through the Microsoft Azure database. In the BI Smart Data Platform we developed, we load flight-aware data and results from leading gaming studies into personas representing the Gladi8tor platform users. This includes viewing behavior, click behavior and the latest statistics on how much an advertiser can charge. Since it is an internal network within an aircraft, it is not possible to sell ads through automated bidding. Passengers who buy something through the platform receive an email with a link to click on to complete their payment.

To load and process the data, we use Azure Functions, Azure Data Factory and SQL Data Warehouses. The visualization for the dashboarding was created in Tableau.