Advertising
See the pitch deck that Google, Hubspot and Wayfair alums used to raise $1.2 million to build the ‘Amazon of out-of-home advertising’
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- OneScreen.ai has raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding in a bid to revamp out-of-home (OOH) advertising.
- The startup claims it’s making OOH advertising more efficient by building a single platform for brands to browse, buy, run and measure their ad campaigns.
- The round was led by TechFarms Capital with other investors including HubSpot cofounders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, and Wayfair’s alumni fund Wayfund.
Outdoor advertising was growing before being crushed by the pandemic. Now it’s coming back, and one adtech startup is hoping to cash in on the opportunity.
OneScreen.ai, which has 13 employees, has raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding to build a platform for brands to search, buy, run and measure their out-of-home (OOH) advertising campaigns.
The round was led by Florida-based fund TechFarms Capital with other investors including HubSpot cofounders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, Wayfair’s alumni fund Wayfund, Lola.com CEO Mike Volpe, and BuySellAds.com CEO Todd Garland also participating.
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The $30 billion dollar OOH industry has been historically fragmented, with different inventory owners selling different formats, from digital outdoor displays flashing a range of ads on the same screen to traditional, static billboards.
OneScreen.ai claims it makes campaign planning, buying and optimization more efficient for ad buyers and sellers. It has a search engine that lets brands find available inventory from 40 sellers already, a platform where sellers can manage their inventory, and a marketplace that lets brands run and measure their campaigns.
“The media owners themselves don’t have great data on what inventory is available, or where it’s located,” Sam Mallikarjunan, CEO of OneScreen.ai, told Insider. “Our goal is to be the Amazon of OOH.”
The startup plans to partner with media owners like Lamar, Outfront Media and Clear Channel so it has access to inventory, as well as companies that supply digital ad-buying software so marketers can use OneScreen.ai to buy ads.
Lamar and Outfront execs are among its advisors, and it will make money by taking a cut from the transactions it processes, Mallikarjunan said.
Below is OneScreen.ai’s fundraising deck.
OneScreen.ai plans to use the $1.2 million raised primarily toward research and development and executing its go-to market strategy.
OneScreen.ai’s co-founders are alums of Google, marketing software company Hubspot and online furniture retailer Wayfair.
OneScreen.ai is trying to solve for the fact that about 50% of OOH inventory goes unsold each month, according to data that it has scraped from its partners.
OneScreen.ai aims to make out-of-home advertising more accessible by streamlining the entire planning, buying and optimizing process, which remains fragmented so far.
There is a plethora of companies across both the buy and sell side that services the out-of-home space, as captured in this graphic by investment bank Luma Partners.
OneScreen.ai sees opportunity in the fact that despite setbacks in 2020, out-of-home advertising is the only traditional medium that’s poised to grow, according to Magna.
Sam Mallikarjunan, CEO of OneScreen.ai said that the out-of-home industry is clamoring for a change, with COVID-19 accelerating its need to modernize.
OneScreen.ai aims to mimic in outdoor advertising what Google and Facebook offer in online advertising.
OneScreen.ai says its search engine will let brands find available inventory. And it compares its tool that lets brands manage and measure their campaigns to Shopify’s measurement tools.
OneScreen.ai wants to include inventory from both traditional and digital out-of-home sources.
OneScreen.ai says it wants to expand the definition of out-of-home advertising to go beyond digital and traditional billboards, and include everything from wrapped ice cream trucks to local events and location-specific connected TVs in restaurants and bars.
After building up its partners, the startup plans to monetize with a SaaS model, with s of anywhere between 10-80% from the transactions it processes, according to Mallikarjunan.
It plans to use the money raised to get to a point where it’s breaking even and can cover its costs, said Mallikarjunan.
OneScreen.ai sees OOH advertising as a $100 billion market opportunity.