With Google and Facebook yielding massive control over the online ad market, tech startups have started to look for opportunities in selling billboards.
AdQuick, a marketplace for out of home (OOH) advertising, tells TechCrunch that it has closed a $6 million Series A led by Initialized Capital with participation from WndrCo, Shrug Capital, Work Life Ventures, The Todd & Rahul Angel Fund and rapper Nas. The startup has now raised $9.4 million to date.
AdQuick isn’t in the business of renting out advertising space they own — like traditional channels, they connect the ad space owner with a buyer and take a commission, but inject the ad analytics of the web into the process.
“You know while the digital market is just so overbid and essentially controlled by Facebook and Google, the returns on investment from out of home ads keeps going up,” Initialized’s Alexis Ohanian, who led the deal, tells TechCrunch.
CEO Matt O’Connor tells TechCrunch that the OOH ad market is seeing big growth across the board — “it’s the only non-online channel growing, and it’s actually growing faster in the last year than it has in the past decade.” The key opportunity AdQuick is tapping into is the 30-35% of OOH ad space they estimate went unused in the United States last year.
