AdQuick, a Los Angeles startup that provides an out-of-home advertising marketplace, announced Thursday it closed on a $6 million Series A funding round.
If you’ve ever seen a giant billboard on the side of a highway or a banner waving from the back of a plane at the beach, then you’ve seen out-of home advertising.
“It’s one of the oldest types of advertising known to humanity and it’s the only offline channel that’s still growing,” AdQuick CEO and co-founder Matt O’Connor told Built In. “With ad blocking, ad fraud and online cookies, online ads have become three to five times more expensive even in the last five years. Companies and brands are looking for alternatives to a greater scale and earlier in their life cycles. So, what’s old is new again.”
However, O’Connor says that, despite an increase in demand, more than 30 percent of America’s OOH inventory is left empty. This is because there are thousands of media owners across the country with varying footprints and no analytics or software bridging buyers to sellers, making it difficult for a company to find outdoor ad space that fits their needs.
“For a buyer to try to do that themselves, they'd be dealing with literally hundreds or thousands of emails, tons of extraneous back and forth and, at the end of the day, a very suboptimal campaign,” O’Connor said.
“By aggregating the inventory into a platform, adding data layers from customers as well as census and other demographic data," O'Connor continued," we allow brands to buy the best possible outdoor advertising campaign based on their goals rather than who happens to own the inventory because they can buy the best locations agnostic to media owners.”
AdQuick’s marketplace helps companies find ad space, negotiate pricing and access analytics to help them evaluate the effectiveness of a given campaign. Its customers include Turo, Instacart and Squarespace.
O’Connor says most of AdQuick’s work has been in Los Angeles, however, this most recent funding will allow the company to expand to New York and San Francisco. He also says the company will be hiring another 50 to 60 people to its current team of 35, focusing mainly on marketing, sales and engineering.
