YESCO and Blip

On yesterday’s Billboard Insider Podcast Pat O’Donnell talked about YESCO’s use of Blip, the automated out of home sales platform.

Patrick O’Donnell, President YESCO Outoor Media

You’ve got something like 46 digital billboards and are using Blip to sell digital space.  Talk about YESCO’s partnership with Blip.

For disclosure purposes, Dave, we are a very minor stockholder in Blip.  Brent Thompson and Jim Munnerlynn came to me a few years ago with this crazy idea that people would be willing to buy digital outdoor one turn at a time.  I drank the Kool Aid and agreed to incubate them.  The result is that Blip is now the largest single source of revenue on our digital bulletins.  Additionally, it’s all local business, and it has accounted for over 2,000 new customers who had never been in the out of home space before.  It’s been everything we thought it would be plus some.

Has Blip cannibalized your revenues?

Absolutely not.  We had great pushback from our sales manager and our sales force and now you would find that they all have been able to recognize that it’s not cannibalizing their customers and in fact what it’s doing is saving them a lot of time and effort that they spend with customers who can’t buy through the traditional model and we can simply send them on to Blip.  All of our sales people have the ability to set up a Blip account for call-ins and we’ve got an arrangement where they can be compensated for that activigy.

What’s your view of the other automated sales platforms.

There’s a lot of chatter about the programmatic companies that are emerging and I’m sure that they’ll all become more relevant.  Our industry though lacks both the will and the cooperation needed to put a core open access platform in place that allows both the buyers and sellers to be in what could be a robust marketplace.  It’s the only way the independents will be able to compete with the public companies.  Unfortunately, everybody is trying to monetize their own model at this point in time.

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