Mobile advertising made so easy, even a Non-Techie can do it

by Tiffany Laurence
August 27, 2013

The advertising world has somewhat of an antiquated business model, and nearwoo’s found many holes specifically within the realm of local mobile advertising. “Most of the people who are in advertising just play an arbitrage game of ‘What can I buy low, sell high?’ They have an active sales team, and are low on the tech side”, says Nearwoo CEO and Co-Founder, Jason Crilly.

“They are not really creating value when they are creating products for ad tech. It’s a lot of what has happened in the finance industry in the last 10 years, you have these people who are making all these different financial products but you don’t necessarily have any value that is being created through them. It’s just creative packaging to sell stuff.” Businesses end up not being able to afford search marketing anymore because of the amount of pressure put on ad agencies for arbitrage search results, and it becomes ineffective in terms of cost.

What is Nearwoo?

This is where Nearwoo comes in. It’s a mobile ad platform that lets you create campaigns, buy ad space and be the sole designer of your ad campaign.

But how do you connect to real customers?  Especially if you don’t know where people are most of the time - they’re constantly moving and are often times using their cell phones to guide them around. Knowing whether or not your target consumer is part of a specific community is quite hard to measure.

“One of the problems companies have is even though there is all this inventory, which is what we call ‘mobile ad impressions’, that’s available within a certain location it’s hard to get it to a point where they can figure out well, I want to advertise to these two specific people in my area. This is what we make really easy to do.”

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How does it work?

Nearwoo makes it a simple step by step process for the user to select local businesses in their area to market to. Data is pulled from sources like Yelp, FourSquare and Factual to pull in images, reviews and information on your company. Once you’ve registered and retrieved this information, you select an image for your ad, highlight specific sections of the neighborhood you wish to market to, choose a tag line or call to action and... et voilà! You have your very own mobile ad campaign.

Membership starts at the best price there is: free. For no cost you can select one area in your location to market to, and anything you select on top of that determines your membership price. What’s even more fantastic is not only do your ads appear on the top of every app and mobile website, they also appear on trending and popular sites like CNN.com, weather.com, Pandora, Words With Friends, etc.

You name it, your ad will most likely make an appearance there on some occasion. With such an easy and accommodating platform to offer, there’s no one else out there doing what nearwoo is aiming at accomplishing.

Who is Nearwoo?

They have brilliant minds to thank, one of which is Start Engine, one of LA’s top accelerators. They were in the first class to graduate from the program and Jason says it helped to connect them to individuals who were able to bring their ideas to life. Their seed funding investors include: Karlin Ventures, Pegasus Capital, Eytan Elbaz, Jess Lapin, Csaba Konkoly, Brad Schwartz, SLP Ventures, Chris Hameetman and Michael Liou.

“We wanted to steer away from a platform like Snapchat. We think they have a great idea and it’s proven to be quite successful, but we wanted to choose a different route. We are aiming at building something sustainable that will maintain a long term strategy. Creating real value for businesses through our mobile ad platform is something we feel will put us ahead of the game and keep us running for the long stretch.”

Nearwoo is bringing something entirely new into the mobile ad scene and Built In Los Angeles is anxious to see what’s next. Jason and his team have a lot of work ahead of them, but we are sure to say that the payoff will be well worth the blood, sweat and tears.

 

 

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