What’s Old is New Again: AdQuick’s Series A And New Board Member, Alexis Ohanian
At AdQuick.com, our mission is to make outdoor advertising the easiest ad to buy in the world.
Online advertising has changed marketing forever. With an easy to book, self-service process combined with detailed attribution, online ads surpassed TV as the largest ad channel in the world last year. However, recent developments make the channel less attractive than in the past. Both rapidly increasing costs combined with brand safety and click fraud concerns have pushed marketers to consider more tangible ad mediums. Enter AdQuick.com and outdoor advertising. From Edward Snowden to the Cambridge Analytica revelations, individuals and firms alike are taking a second look at how much private information they put online and how much business they want to conduct through social media. TV ads are going the same way, cut down to size by a millennial generation that is spending less time in front of the tube.
What does this mean for brands hoping to reach specific audiences? Online ads are and will continue to be an integral part of the strategy, but more and more brands are looking not towards the internet, but towards the outside world.
Outdoor advertising has grown for the eighth consecutive year in a row — the only non-traditional ad sector growing. This centuries-old model of reaching people as they walk, bike, drive, and move around the world has been largely unchanged into the 21st century. Any thorough outdoor ad campaign will span dozens of outdoor media vendors in an unwieldy process with little assurance that their ads are reaching people and making an impression. The process hasn’t been streamlined, and both brands and potential customers suffer for it.
That is, until now.
AdQuick.com’s proposition on outdoor ads is simple: they should be easy to build, book, and track. Our platform has done this for hundreds of customers and thousands of campaigns, and we’re thrilled to announce a new vote of confidence in a product that will entirely reshape the outdoor ad business.
We’ve secured a $2.1 million new round of funding, led by Initialized Capital, that will see us expand upon our first year’s growth and improve the technology underlying our platform. The support offered by Initialized Capital — and the addition of co-founder Alexis Ohanian to our board — is going to help us grow both our platform and ad performance tracking.
Alexis said: “AdQuick has made it incredibly easy to buy and measure outdoor ads. I’ve been buying billboards since 2012; that’s how I first realized how difficult it was. We at Initialized have looked at a lot of other companies that claimed what AdQuick is actually doing (they were just static websites with the same inefficient model of phone calls and emails behind the scenes). This is what’s so impressive about AdQuick, they spoke to users and actually wrote software based on what they heard. The platform is only getting better while outdoor ads are only becoming more and more relevant.”
Specifically, we’ll be evolving our smart-planning algorithms to allow brands to better target their campaigns by geography, demographics, budget, market interest, and other factors. We’ll also be developing better campaign analytics to give customers a concrete understanding of their return on investment, ensuring they have confidence in their campaigns’ performance.
We started AdQuick.com to streamline the cumbersome process of buying outdoor ads, which often involves multiple vendors in different markets who offer only a portion of what’s out there. We also wanted to create a first-of-its-kind performance tracking tool to give brands an accurate assessment of their campaigns.
We’ve succeeded at both of these goals, and with this new round of funding and institutional support, we’re thrilled to bring new data and new ways of booking to brands looking to reach potential customers out in the real world.
Matt O’Connor, co-founder and CEO
