Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
While we often hear of the big national and international companies being interested in and using programmatic ad buying for out-of-home and digital out-of-home, it’s not often we hear of local small- and medium-businesses using it.
Signkick, a UK company, aims to change this.
“We make outdoor advertising easy to buy,” says Tobias van Amstel, CEO and co-founder of Signkick. “But we don’t use ‘programmatic’. We use the term ‘automated’.”
The four-year-old company uses its own in-house-developed software to power an OOH aggregator, covering both paper and digital panels. And while its clients may be the local advertisers, SignKick has arrangements with some of the big companies such as Clear Channel and Primesight along with many smaller owners.
Local advertisers can look at all panels: billboards, transit shelters, phone boxes, digital screens in office buildings and in pubs – all laid out on Signkick’s website, and decide on which sites they want to advertise. They then put them into the Signkick shopping cart and can pay on online. Once it is ascertained that the sites and frequency required are available, the buy is automated using Signkick’s software by the media owner.
“Most of the advertisers know what sites they want – they pass by them everyday – and most buy an average of two or three sites,” says van Amstel. “Some will take eight or 10, others only one, but it averages two or three. The buy is usually for two weeks.”
We wondered if the sites were ever not available when required, but van Amstel said that only happens 2-3% of the time.
“Most of our clients are outside of London proper and scattered right across England, Scotland and Wales, so it’s seldom a big problem,” he says. “It would be more difficult if everyone wanted London because of the big companies’ bookings.
“And,” he says, “we have real-time availability on part of the inventory.”
While this is the main Signkick business model, the company is also making its software available under license worldwide, and is currently finalizing details with its first expected client on that side of the business, whom van Amstel hopes to be able to announce within the next two months.
We asked van Amstel, who hails from The Netherlands, what he did prior to Signkick that got him interested in automated buying.
“After my studies, I founded a travel website that had about 70,000 hotels listed and I saw how difficult it is to buy offline,” he says. “I saw if you could automate offline, it would be more efficient.”
Signkick is owned by Van Amstel and other management, along with one Angel investor. (His travel company is still in operation although he is now just a silent partner.)
Signkick’s advertisers are a real mix of businesses: local garages, property developers, small events, local radio stations and more. The company not only offers them the automated buying program, but, acknowledging that a lot of advertisers don’t have agencies or artwork, it also has an in-house design department that prepares artwork for approximately 40% of its clients.
“Our aim is to give local advertisers the same advertising buying ease as that of the big advertisers,” says Van Amstel, adding that Signkick only makes itself known online and by word-of-mouth, although it does also send emails to current customers. It has no sales team.
Next Wednesday afternoon, Tobias is helping drive the debate on ‘Programmatic’ – a term we agreed earlier he is not necessarily comfortable with, Ed, at the Programmatic Buying and Marketplace Workshop together with VUKUNET’s Dirk Huelsermann and Mereo’s Elias Bauguil.
With just over 50 people signed up already and with ALL the important media buyers and specialists in the room, this workshop is one that is sure to help the UK and continental European industry move forward.
There is still time to register for the workshop here.
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