Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Adkom, a North American aggregated network of independent out-of-home inventory, is now the exclusive representative of Lyft’s digital taxi-top advertising network to national and specialist agencies. Lyft acquired Halo Cars earlier this year.
This exclusive partnership places Adkom as the single source for agencies to buy the majority of NYC’s live digital car-top fleet but in our opinion it is also an incredibly foolish move.
Adkom position themselves as a platform to make it easy to execute campaigns across all digital OOH. So you would think that the sensible move would be to partner with as many media owners and publishers as possible in order to increase the amount of inventory possible. Yet Adkom (with Lyft in this announcement), along with Adomni and their Uber announcement earlier in February have both have signed first partner sales arrangements – essentially competing with the largest and most legitimate of all taxi top businesses, Curb Media.
Adkom CEO Cedric Bernard said “Adkom was created to necessarily accelerate the pace of transformation needed to facilitate the buying of OOH media at scale. Lyft’s confidence in Adkom is a testament to the success we have already demonstrated in consolidating America’s independent OOH inventory. Adkom now offers more than 15,000 locations across the country to national buyers, including mobile domination of NYC streets.”
Ben Shanken, Lyft Media’s Senior Director of Product, said “We’ve invested in New York City in order to build the largest-ever fleet of digital car-top advertising opportunities that will transform the kind of advertising that’s possible on the medium. We’re focused on establishing scale to unlock unique targeting and measurement approaches, such as our recent campaign with Change.org to drive hyperlocal petitions. By working with Adkom to facilitate the buying experience, we are excited to take the car-top advertising segment to the next level.”
Since inception in early 2020, Adkom claim to have created a network of independently owned OOH inventory into a single, automated transactional experience for national agencies and media planners. This announcement made mention that the addition of Lyft Media’s inventory to the portfolio will extend Adkom’s offering of real-time, automated, and dynamically triggered hyper targeting capabilities to national agencies and brands who desire 100% share-of-voice domination of NYC streets.
We are not so sure.
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