AdQuick, a Venice, CA-based technology company, has announced it raised a $1.1 million seed round to help bring the outdoor and billboard advertising industry online. By collecting new online metrics for the effectiveness and reach of outdoor advertising, AdQuick has been able to give marketers a better understanding of their work in a once data-poor ad channel.
The company allows brands to plan, build, book and track their outdoor advertising campaigns all within their platform. Making the experience easier has led to strong traction with bookings growing at over 150% per month. Early customers have included H&R Block, Lyft, Peloton, Instacart, and OVO/Drake, among others.
A few early examples of how AdQuick quantified impacts of out-of-home ad campaigns can be found in blog posts about their OVO and Orange Theory Fitness case studies. Orange Theory Fitness was able to find the available ad locations near their new location, book the ad, and integrate the direct SMS call to action all within the AdQuick platform.
“Our mission is to make outdoor advertising the easiest ad channel in the world to buy. Part of buying advertising is knowing what results you can expect. As the AdQuick platform tracks more campaign data, we will be able to show marketers what to expect based on their locations, demographics, and overall spend,” said CEO Matt O’Connor.
Outdoor advertising accounted for $7.6 Bn in of the $196 Bn US ad spend in 2016, according to emarketer.com. The AdQuick teams sees major upside for the OOH channel that currently accounts for only 4% of US ad spend.
“As ad-supported TV impressions plummet and ad-blockers propagate, the two largest ad channels (accounting for 70% of US ad spend) have a lot of uncertainty around them. As we quantify the impact of outdoor advertising, we think there’s a lot of upside for the industry as a whole.”
On the media vendor side, AdQuick has built technology to bring smaller, low-tech vendors online and give brands an easy way to find that inventory. Other companies in the space function more like traditional agencies, relying on e-mail, spreadsheets, Powerpoints to plan and execute campaigns. Vendors as geographically diverse as View Outdoor (Chicago), Angel Media (Manhattan), Circle City Outdoor (Indianapolis) and New South Outdoor (Alabama) have all embraced AdQuick as an online channel for broader distribution.
The founding team hails from Instacart, where they built technology to help connect offline retailers to online buyers. They’re using that experience and their frustration with the status quo of buying outdoor advertising to inform their approach to the market, building tools to empower media vendors.
Investor and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian explained why Initialized Capital invested in AdQuick: “The out-of-home advertising industry has desperately needed software and Adquick is finally delivering it, making everything–from idea to execution to measuring the ROI–easier than ever before. It’s rare to find such a strong product team working on such an un-sexy and slow-adopter industry, but that’s precisely why we’re so excited about this team.”
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