This story was first reported on and published by Glossy sibling site Modern Retail.
Set Active, a Los Angeles-based activewear brand, is picking a much-visited destination this holiday season for its biggest out-of-home campaign: the airport security line.
From Nov. 3 to Dec. 7, Set Active will take over a total of 1,535 Transportation Security Administration bins at Los Angeles International Airport, the brand told Modern Retail. It will have a presence at 80% of all screening lanes across every checkpoint at LAX. The trays will show off imagery from Set Active’s new seasonal collection: a mix of sports bras, sweatpants, leggings and sweatshirts.
Set Active has experimented with OOH before, through wild postings in New York City in August. But the TSA activation marks its first time marketing in airports, as well as its largest awareness initiative to date. Up until now, much of Set Active’s marketing efforts have been organic and focused on customer retention. With this new campaign, though, Set Active is focusing more on customer acquisition, and it hopes the airport — a place where people often wear athleisure to travel — can be key to this effort.
“We are selling product that is very relevant to the current situation,” Kira Mackenzie Jackson, the brand’s chief brand officer, said in an interview. “Like, ‘You’re wearing a hoodie? Let me talk to you about a different hoodie you might like better.’ The customer is already in that headspace, so it’s the perfect place for us to play.”
Set Active, founded in 2018 by Lindsey Carter, relies on the premise that its products can transition from the workday to a workout. Popular on social media, the privately held brand has amassed a loyal fan base (including Kylie Jenner and Hailey Bieber), thanks to its limited-edition drops that sell out in minutes and its crowdsourced collections, in which fans vote on styles and colors. Set Active sells products on its website, on TikTok Shop, at its two stores and via wholesale partners like Equinox. The brand doesn’t publish revenue publicly, but in May, Carter posted on Instagram that one of its drops had brought in $1 million in sales in one hour.
Currently, most of the brand’s customers live on the coasts, especially the West Coast, where the brand makes a regular appearance in yoga and pilates studios. However, Set Active is using its new airport campaign to target people who live in Los Angeles but may be traveling to other cities for Thanksgiving.
While the new campaign starts at the airport, it will bleed into other channels. After installing the bins at LAX, Set Active will run ads on Meta with a similar creative. “Maybe, in a couple days, [someone will] see an ad pop up on their Instagram and say, ‘Oh, I remember seeing that bin,'” Jackson said. Set Active then hopes that person will make a purchase. To measure the campaign’s success, Set Active will analyze the split between its newly acquired and retained customers for the period, year over year.
The airport, as a whole, has become a more sought-after marketing channel in the last few years, especially after Covid, remarked Brian Rappaport, CEO and founder of Quan Media Group, an OOH agency that’s played a role in multiple airport campaigns. “The opportunities alone are vast,” he told Modern Retail. “You can target individual clubs, wrap jet bridges en route to the plane, hop on gorgeous digital networks and even brand [the] moving walkways.”
Rappaport is especially getting “a ton of requests” from brands for TSA bin content, he said. His company has worked with baby products company Frida and the credit card Gemini on such asks. TSA bins are also gaining traction on social media as young travelers carefully arrange their shoes and computers inside, then snap an aesthetically pleasing photo.
Those bins present a huge opportunity for brands, Rappaport said. “In my opinion, it comes down to dwell time and captive audience,” he said. “You’re standing there, grabbing a bin, holding it, putting your belongings in it. If a brand nails creative, … it’s unmissable.” Melissa Minkow, global director of retail strategy and insights for digital consultancy firm CI&T, agreed that “when people are in line for TSA, there’s not much else they can do because they have to pay attention, … so they would be forced to look at this type of marketing.”
Still, not all brands and products may fit in with the airport environment, said Andrea Leigh, the founder of e-commerce consultancy firm Allume Group and a former Amazon executive. “You’re talking about right place, right time, right message,” she explained. “Would it make sense for a milk brand to be advertising in TSA bins? Maybe not. But [with Set Active,] people are thinking about being comfortable while they’re traveling.”
Set Active is open to advertising in other airports, although it wants to see how its bet on TSA bins performs. And the brand is looking to do more OOH, more generally. For next year, for instance, Set Active is planning some pop-ups, and “out of home is going to be important to those initiatives,” Jackson said. Most of all, she said, Set Active wants to keep OOH localized.
“I think, more often than not, people do out-of-home when they want an omnipresent, larger-than-life feel,” Jackson said. “That’s important. But for us, when we’re thinking about out-of-home, it has to be coupled to a ‘why.’ So, every time we do out-of-home next year, it’s going to be anchored in a physical location.”
