When Alex Ewing was a child growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the automobile window. Now, because the CEO of OneScreen.ai, he’s helping startups like fintech Ramp and technical recruiter Karat advertise on billboards and beyond.
“I believe billboards are cool and help bring creativity back into marketing,” Ewing told TechCrunch. “They’re like canvases for marketers in a way a digital screen isn’t.”
Ewing joined Boston-based OneScreen last 12 months. The corporate acts as a software-enabled middleman between startups and out-of-home (OOH) promoting slots like billboards, subway ads and others. OneScreen helps startups find the correct placement for his or her ads based on the potential customers corporations want to achieve paired with the demographic and historical data on the platform. The corporate also uses anonymized location data to assist corporations track how successful their campaigns are.
OneScreen has raised $4.7 million from investors including Asymmetric Capital Partners, Techstars and Impellent Ventures, amongst others. The corporate is currently profitable and tripled its revenue last 12 months.
Billboards and other sorts of OOH marketing have gotten increasingly en vogue, especially for startups, Ewing said. OOH promoting spend within the U.S. is anticipated to achieve $9.3 billion this 12 months, in accordance with Statista, and is predicted to achieve nearly $12 billion by 2029.
But why would a B2B company like Ramp wish to advertise in a classic consumer manner like the outside of city buses or inside subway cars?
Ewing said that corporations need to turn their attention back to OOH promoting strategies after years of being focused on digital marketing. He added that regulations around privacy and targeted ads, and the flexibility for people to dam digital ads, have made internet advertising strategies less successful for a lot of.
“B2B, B2C, corporations in all places from Series A, Series B, [companies that are] very well funded or publicly traded have said, ‘we will’t invest what we’ve been investing in digital anymore, the ROI isn’t there,’” Ewing said. “It continues to get increasingly expensive and it’s getting less and fewer effective.”
What this type of promoting creates is brand recognition which is simpler for B2B corporations than people may realize even when nearly all of individuals who see the ad aren’t prone to turn into customers.
In February, Hila Perl, the director of strategic communications at Papaya Global, told TechCrunch that B2B HR startup Papaya was buying a $7 million Super Bowl ad for that exact reason.
“It’s not a lead generation move,” Perl said in regards to the company’s ad purchase. “It’s not so we will sell more. Obviously, yes we wish to see a really direct ROI but all of us understand this can be a brand constructing or a brand awareness play, it’s not a lead generation play. In my mind it’s all the time a marathon slightly than a sprint.”
While OneScreen can’t control who sees an OOH ad, Ewing said his company can still help corporations reach a targeted audience. B2B corporations may give OneScreen a listing of goal customer corporations and OneScreen’s tech will develop a technique for them that features promoting slots near their goal corporations’ headquarters or where their employees could be commuting out and in from. It uses anonymized cellphone tracking data to see how people reacted to the ad through metrics like website traffic from those who passed the ad compared to people who didn’t.
The downside is that the ROI on OOH ads can’t be tracked as easily as connecting the dots between someone clicking on a digital ad after which purchasing online shortly after. However the hope is that seeing a Latest York MTA bus wrapped in a Ramp ad shall be simpler than a chilly sales pitch email.
“There may be nothing more powerful than seeing an organization and brand in the true world,” Ewing said. “In case you get that in front of the correct people, that could be a powerful option to soften the beachhead for inbound or to easily just drive leads.”
