This is the sixth in a series of Billboard Insider profiles of the companies who are automating the out of home sales process. We’ve previously written about Adsemble and Adquick, ADstruc and Fliphound and Broadsign. Insider counts 10 North American companies that are trying to develop websites to facilitate buying and selling out of home advertising: ADstruc, AdSemble, Adquick, Broadsign, DoMedia, Fliphound, Kinetic, rVue, Vistar and Xaxis Places.
Company: Vistar Media
Headquarters: 137 5th Avenue, New York, NY
Phone: 512-537-6890
Vistar Media is a geospatial technology company bridging the space between advertising ecosystems and consumer movement patterns. Founded in 2012, Vistar created the first and only universal marketplace for out-of-home media, building a programmatic platform that has been widely adopted by buyers and sellers. Vistar provides marketers with unprecedented access to consumers at the right place and right time, through a data agnostic system for analyzing consumer movement patterns and activating cross-screen mobile and out-of-home media. The company’s executive team includes Michael Provenzano (CEO and Co-Founder), Mark Chadwick (CTO and Co-Founder) and Jeremy Ozen (President and Co-Founder) For more information, visit www.vistarmedia.com.
How did Vistar get involved in the out of home industry?
Taking our experience from building Invite Media, one of the first DSPs, acquired by Google in 2011, we were interested in taking the core concepts of data-driven, automated and measureable media transactions into other channels of advertising. The out-of-home (OOH) industry, like TV and radio, was being transacted in a traditional way, so by providing a mechanism to make this channel further tied to marketer’s lower funnel KPIs, we could rapidly grow OOH’s portion of the advertising budget. The channel itself is unique as it passively reaches consumers through a very important, active part of their day. Also, it will continue to gain value as urban populations continue to grow. People are always going to leave their homes. Out-of-home is real estate, just like an apartment in downtown Manhattan would be. It will continue to have value and if chosen well, will appreciate in value. As will the eyeballs that frequent that location at different times of day.
Vistar decided to build the programmatic platform where marketers and media owners could efficiently transact and measure the efficacy of those media transactions.
Not too dissimilar from real estate where you have distressed assets, up and coming neighborhoods – the assets are there, the eyeballs are there. Marketers have always suffered from not understanding which eyeballs are there and how to measure those eyeballs that were exposed to determine if they actually purchased their products or services. Vistar helps solve that issue for buyers and sellers.
Describe how the Vistar platform works.
Vistar Media is an advertising platform that enables brands to reach consumers based on their behavior in the real-world. We work with enormous data sets that help us understand where consumers go throughout their day. Through our geospatial technology, we are able to not only gain valuable insights from this data but more importantly, are able to act on this data by reaching consumers across multiple channels, including mobile devices and digital out-of-home screens.
Vistar has a whole stack of products for buyers and sellers. Buyers are given access to our DSP via self or managed service capacities allowing them to transact guaranteed and non-guaranteed buys. Sellers have revenue management tools, including direct ad serving, reporting, billing, inventory management and our exchange.
How many markets and how many structures are involved?
Vistar has offices in multiple major cities in the U.S. including: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco. We are also developing plans to open an office in the UK, as this is traditionally a main hub for OOH advertising.
Vistar works with over 90% of the out-of-home media owners in the US. We are launching our products in the UK and Canada now and expect those to be huge markets for us in the coming months. This expansion is key in the DOOH industry as we apply global standards to automated, data-driven transactions.
What benefits does the Vistar platform provide to an out of home company?
Vistar provides out-of-home media owners with the technology to increase utilization and rates to maximize yield on their real estate assets while providing measurement proving the effectiveness of their assets for marketers. Vistar does this through two distinct sets of technology products that work seamlessly with each other: revenue management and infrastructure.
Vistar provides a complete revenue management platform making it possible to run an entire OOH media business through a single system. From managing inventory to activating campaigns with custom creative to targeting data segments to reporting and billing..
Vistar also provides an infrastructure solution for connected devices, called Cortex. It provides a media owner with remote device management of their device fleet and real-time monitoring of their network. This backbone is crucial for the stability and performance of their network resulting in maximum revenue per asset.
What are the fees or commissions when an out of home company uses the system?
Similar to the online ad ecosystem, Vistar has slightly different business models for the different types of transactions that take place on the platform. Vistar takes a % of revenue from media owners that receive incremental revenue from the ad exchange. Vistar charges a monthly fee to media owners using the full ad tech stack for their direct sales business. Data and measurement fees are based on the vendor and are all transparent inside the marketplace.
Tomorrow Vistar will describe some successful ad platform campaigns.
[wpforms id=”9787″]
Paid Advertisement
