Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Earlier this year, two companies announced their entry into the Ride Share Advertising Services business. Wrapify launched a Static+ ride share topper and Uber started testing the waters with Cargo. a company with zero experience with digital out of home.
Uber’s new announcement this week, a deal with AdTECH business Adomni, at least has one thing going for it – Adomni do understand DOOH. Having said that, it is still a business model that we believe will not work (more on that story, separately here).
Let’s look at some of the background first …
- Wrapify which already bills itself as the performance-driven ad tech platform for brands powered by OOH and the gig economy, recently announced the launch of the Static+ Rideshare Topper. The Static+ Rideshare Topper is described as a proprietary product and nationally-scalable medium that utilises Wrapify’s unique Attribution Suite and Physical Retargeting capabilities, allowing brands to place advertisements on top of the modern-day taxi, including Uber and Lyft rideshare vehicles.
- Cargo raised USD 30M as early as 2016 to put snack boxes in Uber vehicles. For a while they were flying high but the harsh realities of the market hit them hard and they’ve recently closed that business. Whilst they claim that drivers earned USD 13 million by distributing 12 million products to 35 million passengers, it was pretty obvious that it was never going to be a sustainable business. Their latest gimmick (sorry business model) is a partnership with Uber where they are putting LED screens on a roof rack and putting them on Uber cars.
James Heller, CEO and co-founder of Wrapify said “Taxi top advertising in New York is a USD 30 million industry, and in the last few years, many companies have failed to enter the market to replicate this success. Now, with our Static+ Rideshare Topper, we are paving the way for more organizations to capitalize on this effective form of advertising. Over the last five years, we’ve built a strong operational network that has allowed us to construct this smart product at scale, allowing access for more organizations to utilize this effective form of advertising. As the largest rideshare specific platform, we’ve designed the Static+ Rideshare Topper to not only serve brands, agencies and publishers, but to also create a new opportunity for rideshare drivers to monetize their time on the road by earning money for miles they are already driving each day.”
Whilst Wrapify has a nationwide network of verified drivers using their app and certified installers supporting brand campaigns this is a new business that we believe will not work.
Everyone of the companies that has raised money to build a business putting advertisements on or in Ride Share cars has abandoned their original core mission (Firefly, Cargo, Wrapify). Firefly is now trying to work with taxis and Wrapify has effectively said the same thing.
There may be hundreds of thousands of ride share drivers but you cannot build a business when the driver pool churns every few months and the drivers who do stick with it don’t actually spend a ton of time on the road.
It does seem that we will continue to see a lot of investors losing money, figuring out that proper licensed taxis are the superior platform for advertising services.
January 13th, 2020 at 15:18 @679
Thanks for the mention. We have not abandoned our core mission. We’ve added a product to further reinforce it.