AdQuick partners with Outfront Media to bring technology to $2B out-of-home ad inventory

graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, we will kick off our lightning round. The Lambda Lightning round. We will go to the cloud hopefully. We'll see. The Lambda Lightning round begins now with Chris from Adqu, one of our favorite people. TBPN royalty, as the chat likes to say. Let's bring Chris in to the TVN Ultra. Chris, how are you doing? Great to see you.

Is that a TVPN?

Beautiful jacket. That is a fantastic jacket. I like the liner, too. Anyway,

yeah, picked it up in London at Charles Turret.

No way. Very Couldn't uh couldn't uh miss out on the opportunity to uh get dripped out with my fellow technology brothers.

I love it. I love it. Uh uh re reintroduce the company and sort of explain the shape of the business these days and then take us into the news

for anyone that hasn't heard.

I know

1,000 adqu's building the infrastructure for real world advertising. though out of home. Um so when you think about it over the last 30 years um every dollar of every ad spend has gone to doing one thing reaching

uh human beings with a message and that's primarily been done through digital channels

cookies pixels realtime bidding programmatic

that's all digital. Um, but what they did forget is that people are outside. People are constantly getting exposed to an advertising medium and this one hasn't been optimized. It hasn't been uh architected with technology and so you know the big players like Google, Amazon, uh the trade desk, uh none of them have cracked the nut that is out of home advertising and you know we're we're building the pipes and the plumbing for it.

Yeah. So there's a lot of interaction with the physical world. At a certain point, someone has to physically print the billboard, put it up, like tape it down, tie it down, do whatever. And you are able to abstract that and then serve a company with a thing that looks like a, you know, more traditional digital uh platform, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And most importantly is uh proving that the medium works. So we now live in an age where

you know, you don't get investment in advertising unless you could prove that it works. And

so we pioneered uh the measurement and the analytics. So if you get exposed to an out of home ad and then to subsequently do something uh online in an app, go into a store uh we can attribute that to the exposure and then model it out with uh all the rest of your channels.

So it's out of home advertising made easy and measurable. That's what I'm getting from this.

That's right.

Uh but take us through the more recent news. What's going on with the business? Yeah. So, uh there's three big players in the space. Um in in the United States, uh it's a $10 billion market. Two billion roughly is uh is sold by Outfront Media.

And uh you'll see their billboards and their transit in New York, Los Angeles, and all the major metros.

And to be clear, they own the physical real estate. They own the physical like the the structure that the billboard goes on. That's part of their business.

Or just the the rights.

Or the rights. the rights. The rights and the structures.

Got it. Okay. Rights.

Yeah. And so this is uh this is an organization that's like two 2,000 employees, a thousand sellers, all regionally distributed.

And uh they've been selling this medium very much like uh you know, real estate agents have prior to like your your open door, your Zillow, so on and so forth.

And uh for the first time ever, they're going to have world-class technology to support their sales efforts across these thousand sellers. And then they'll be also using our audiences to uh find the best fit for their inventory against an audience and then also um measure the success for their clients.

Mhm. So, uh, yeah, walk me through, uh, the the the the measurement problem because, uh, on my drive to work, every day I drive through Hollywood, I see so many billboard ads for movies. And whenever I buy tickets, I wind up going on Fandango, and there's a huge disconnect there. I don't know that I've gotten a survey, but with the right data, you could probably see that I was in this area or I purchased something on a credit card panel in this area and I might have been exposed to that billboard. Like, I could imagine how you could piece that together that I went to this particular movie because I saw this billboard. have been seeing billboards for the uh project hail Mary and we are actually going and the billboards should get some of that attribution but other than hearing me say it right now I don't know how you would puzzle that together. So what is the process these days?

Sure. So uh your weather app doesn't make money by telling you it's going to rain. Okay.

Um we buy up all the highest quality mobile traffic data. Sure. We pipe seven billion pings into our platform every single day. Yeah. So we know

where you are. Yeah.

Uh what time you're at, what direction you're heading at, what speed you're heading at, and all these things.

Um and then we uh use that to basically identify when the mobile device is inside of a geoence that we have geoenced all of the inventory in the platform.

Got it.

And then we count that as an exposure.

Sure. We then map the exposure to a pixel on the website and uh an SDK in an app or we also in the case of brick and mortar will actually geoence the store location. Yeah.

And so we can kind of connect the dots that way.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

Uh break down kind of trends in the SF out ofome market. Like how is how is kind of all the the AI funding boom?

Yeah. Does a billboard up in SF cost like 10 times as much as anywhere else? like what's the ratio at least?

Yeah. I mean it's uh after you know we had that 2023 we had the software recession 2024

uh we started to see things come pick back up

and in the last 12 months uh it's gone gang busters for for the AI companies. Um to answer your question, yeah, the the prices are some of the most expensive in the market and um but you know, you know, some of our customers are some of the leading AI companies. Finn being one of them. Uh 11 Labs we've we've done campaigns for and so yeah, you're starting to see uh AI companies use this channel to, you know, kind of break through the clutter of uh of digital.

What's the most underrated out ofome form factor in your view? Um, if you're B2B, um, I really like, uh, account-based marketing or account-based. So, basically, you take all of your HQs for your target accounts, you put them in the map, and then you buy up all the inventory surround surrounding,

that's like bus stops, you know, basically like just flood the zone in a in a like twob block radius kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly. And uh I don't know if you recall, but um I'd say like maybe like five or six years ago, the founders of Brex took over all of San Francisco, most of San Francisco being their target market, and I think they spent like half a million bucks and you know, customer acquisition.

I think I think people haven't fully processed that like there seems to be like increasing like returns as you spend more on out of home. uh which is that like you know if you spend 50 grand on a campaign somewhere around LA you're going to have you know some effect but if you if you spend spend you know dramatically more than that like an order of magnitude it seems like you really like breakthrough in a different way. Uh it's funny Sam Sam Blonde uh who who did that original campaign, he's back with his new uh a new company and uh taking the same approach, you know, heavy heavy heavy out of home spend. Um

yeah, some some of our teammates in San Francisco were saying that Monaco's up and down the uh 101. I think they bought like 60 60 or 70 billboards. So they're making their presence felt.

Yeah. He told me about that before we had him on the show and I was like that is such a bold way to to introduce your company. But it it it really does break through. I've seen photos of it and if you're there you'll you'll see.

What about on the on the supply side? How how heavy are the restrictions on bringing on new out ofome supply is? I'm assuming obviously it's city by city. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to put like, you know, a massive billboard uh on my on my house. Uh but uh no, I just think in in in general,

hey, honey, I sold the front yard.

I sold the roof.

Hey, our mortgage is going to be half the price now. That's amazing. How

Yeah. So, in terms of limitations, um in 1965, the highway beautifification act was passed. So, that kind of restricts how many

required every highway to have to have beautiful billboards.

Okay.

Yeah. So, so basically there's only a a certain subset that you could put near highways, but you're starting to see all these other formats kind of come about. Um, you know, there's folks putting ads on trucks. Yeah.

There's folks uh wrapping Ubers. They're putting ads inside of Ubers. They're putting

pulling planes in the sky, which is kind of old school, but um

skyriting.

And then drone shows are are the the new big thing, and I expect to see a lot more of those in the future.

I know. I'm surprised it hasn't been hasn't been utilized. The only other thing is can you can you put a blimp on adqu? Like I'm I've I've given I've given this advice to enough companies now and they haven't done it. But just like a flying a blimp like a Goodyear blimp over SF for

Goodyear's just cornered the market. I think that they wouldn't I don't think Goodyear would sell their blimp for billion dollars. I think that's just their greatest capital asset they have because you could monetize that thing so well flying around San Francisco. you know, uh, we do have 2,000 media owners on the platform and I'm pretty sure that might fit the bill.

That'd be amazing. Amazing.

Uh, well, congratulations on on the on the partnership and, uh, thank you again for being our

uh, you had to have been the second

the second advertiser right after Ramp to back us. And, uh, we'll never forget your support.

We appreciate you, Chris. Congrats to the whole team.

We'll talk. Great to see you.

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