Introducing AdQuick Programmatic & Attribution Suite

We're excited to share that we’re launching two new products today that we think will change the out-of-home advertising industry forever.

Introducing AdQuick Programmatic & Attribution Suite

Yes, we actually put this Rick Astley ad in Times Square using our product. It took us less than 5 minutes.

3 Sentence Summary

Too busy to read this whole post? Here's what's new:

With AdQuick's new programmatic digital out-of-home DSP you can launch a national out-of-home advertising campaign without sending a single email, in one hour or less.

With AdQuick Attribution you can track actual conversions, then optimize your programmatic campaign in real-time.

These products both launched today, and are available to use immediately :)

It’s Launch Day

I’m excited to share that we’re launching two new products today that we think will change the out-of-home advertising industry forever.

The first is AdQuick Programmatic: a revolutionary new way to buy outdoor ads.

The second is AdQuick Attribution: the only end-to-end solution to measure ROI on outdoor ads, starting on day one of your campaign, available for both traditional and programmatic OOH campaigns.

it’s an incredible new way to measure the ROI on outdoor ads, starting on day one of your campaign, on traditional and programmatic campaigns.

These two products are designed to work together, but they can work separately too.

We’ve been working on them for the last almost nine months, so we’re excited to finally show them to the world.

In this post I’ll share the problems we saw that motivated us to build these products, and what exactly makes our solution different.

The Challenge with Traditional Buys

There are a few reasons that traditional outdoor ad campaigns are difficult.

First, since you’re typically locked into a 4 week minimum on any unit, you really want to get the right units.

This creates a lot of lead time and legwork since you want to create the best possible media plan.

Then once you execute the plan, you probably don’t want to change it very much given all the effort it took to plan and execute.

Second, buying outdoor ads often means a lot of email communication, especially if you’re involving many media owners.

Who wants to deal with that when you can just click a button and buy some online ads?

Lastly, buying out-of-home media is a data-poor experience.

If you’re using AdQuick Classic for your traditional out-of-home media buying, then at least you’re using our price guide and data layers to help you plan.

But however you buy, you typically get one analytics report at the end of the campaign, if you get one at all.

With online ads, you can optimize your campaigns as they run, but in outdoor we’ve been stuck in the direct buying stone age.

For some campaigns this makes sense,

but if you really want to optimize against a KPI, this “buy and pray for lift” approach is lame compared to the wealth of data you get from online ads.

In summary, this is why we got so excited about programmatic & cutting-edge OOH analytics – precisely because they have the potential to solve these huge industry problems.

The Promise of Programmatic DOOH & Analytics

Here’s how programmatic buying can help solve these problems:

First, most programmatic media owners don’t have minimums on programmatic buys, which means you don’t need to make the perfect plan, it just needs to be good enough, since you can modify your plan in real-time with very little effort.

Second,  because programmatic buying is all done through automated APIs, you can turn any particular screen on and off at will, with no email communication.

So the typical burden of planning & executing a campaign is completely gone.

Building and launching a plan is ridiculously easy.

I would go so far as saying that it’s even easier than building a Facebook or Google Ad campaign.

Lastly, because you can now iterate on your plan quickly, if you could get ROI data back quickly, you could theoretically optimize your campaign while it’s running.

Well, that’s an interesting idea, right?

That’s what we thought!

in fact, it was so interesting that we decided we had to build it.

AdQuick Programmatic Product Breakdown

Alright, so you’re convinced that programmatic DOOH can cure cancer and solve world hunger.

But there are already some solutions out there.

What’s different about this new kid on the block?

When we looked at what was out there, we asked ourselves, what would we ourselves want from a product like this, and frankly, we didn’t find it.

We saw a lot of problems, but we figured we could solve them.

Just as there were mp3 players before the iPod, we hope that AdQuick Programmatic will be the iPod of programmatic DOOH.

Low bar, right?

What makes AdQuick Programmatic different

1. Maximum inventory

AdQuick integrates with almost every SSP, meaning that we have the most inventory in one place.

While programmatic inventory is growing quickly, it’s currently only a small percentage of total digital out-of-home inventory, so we wanted it all in one place to ensure the best user experience.

2. Familiar, modern interface

Marketers already have a lot on their plate, they don’t want to have to learn a new thing.

AdQuick Programmatic is built from the ground up using the latest web technology and UX best-practices, making it fast & ridiculously easy to use.

3. Transparent

Almost every marketer we’ve talked to about programmatic DOOH has said that transparency is key.

So in AdQuick, you can see exactly what you’re buying, who you’re buying it from, and how much it costs.

We’ve done the hard work to get either an image or an example image for every single unit.

You can see where your units ran, and where they are running in real-time on our interactive POP map.

It doesn’t get more transparent than that.

4. Buy Audiences, Units, or Both

Audience-based buying is useful – you can use it to build a plan without having to pick and choose individual units.

So that’s why we’ve integrated both movement-based, and demographic-based audience data into the product.

Normally buying this type of data adds an extra CPM fee to your campaign.

That’s no fun though.

We want your dollars to go as far as possible, so we’ve made this audience data  available to use for free.

We can also build custom audiences for you for a small one-time fee, which you can then re-use across programmatic and traditional.

We can also integrate first-party data to build a custom audience, although that comes with a larger fee.

But often with audience-based buying, the units you’re actually getting are obfuscated.

With AdQuick Programmatic, this is not the case.

When you move the audience slider, you can see the map update in real-time to show you which units will be on your plan.

So after the fact, if you want to review the units and make sure they are brand-safe, you can totally do that!

Alternatively, if you want to buy a few particular units, you can do that instead of buying with audiences.

Simply target those units with points of interest, venue type, and publisher filters, and you’re off to the races.

Because we built unit-level audience indexes in-house, and beacuse we built an interactive map that reponds to filters in real-time, you get the best of both (buying) worlds.

5. Advanced Analytics are Baked In

With programmatic, you could optimize your campaigns on a daily basis, if you had data to optimize on.

Well, this is where AdQuick Attribution rides in on a white horse.

Now, let’s dive into that.

AdQuick Attribution

The challenges with measurement in out-of-home are numerous. In the online world, it’s simple: you get impressions, clicks, and conversions.

But in outdoor, you trust static media owner reported impressions estimates for impressions, and you don’t really have a way to measure clicks or conversions.

The way marketers have often solved for measurement in OOH is by running brand lift studies, i.e. surveys.

That’s nice, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.

As a marketer, you want to drive real ROI, and while brand awareness is great, it’s pretty fuzzy and doesn’t get at incremental revenue.

So what would a “click” be in the out-of-home world?

Well, what if you could track everyone who viewed your billboard, then later determine if they took some action you cared about.

This could be to visit your website, a download of your app, or a visit to your brick-and-mortar store.

So you’re probably thinking, if you could do that that would be great, but that’s just not possible.

Well actually, I’m here to tell you today that it is very possible.

Not only that, but we’ve built it, it’s turnkey, and it’s free with any AdQuick campaign, traditional or programmatic.

Here’s how it works:

1) Create view-sheds: we draw precise view-sheds, which is a fancy word for polygon, around the visible areas of your ad units. For example, the view-shed of a highway billboard would be about hundred yards ahead on the highway, but only in the direction the board is facing.

2) Identify exposed devices: we aggregate anonymized mobile location data, then we query to determine which devices were present in the view-shed. While running this query, we consider the direction the device is moving, the speed it’s moving, the direction it’s facing, and the time it spends inside the view-shed.

3) Connect exposed devices to conversion events: Let’s say you have two conversion events you want to measure: a website visit, and a website checkout. We provide you with a pixel to place on your website in those two locations. Then, through some key data partnerships, we’re able to connect a device that was in the view-shed to the user who checks out on your site, thus completing the attribution funnel.

All this data is visible in-flight, while your campaign is running.

You can view this data for one campaign, or across all running campaigns.

But wait, there’s one more thing.

Delivered Impressions Measurement

With outdoor ads, right you don’t truly know how many impressions you got.

This is especially challenging now because of the change in mobility patterns due to Covid-19.

Well, we’ve got an answer for that too.

We’ve partnered with data providers that are connected to the major cellular networks, so now we can give you an accurate view of how many people saw your ad, also known as delivered impressions.

This service is a very affordable add-on that runs in-flight on your campaign.

The data streams in daily and is visible in your results dashboard.

Conclusion

I hope this overly verbose and long-winded post has been informative. If not, well, how did you make it this far ;)

We’re super-excited to be innovating in the outdoor ad space, and I sincerely hope that you find these products useful, and most importantly that they help your business succeed by spreading the word about whatever it is you’re doing as quickly, efficiently, and – dare I say – stylishly as possible.

– Vic Ramon, Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at AdQuick