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Comment by jsonne | Hacker News Reader

No offense to Mr Friedman, but almost everyone that works in marketing and tech has had the adwords for billboards idea, or tv or radio for that matter. I once upon a time played with an adwords for trade magazines idea that went nowhere. This is one of those things where almost every single entrenched player has incentives to keep this from becoming the reality, and outside owning the inventory outright I don't think its possible to change this system. (As a note someone please prove me wrong)

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We're working on it for billboards:

https://www.adquick.com

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/14/adquick-seed-funding/

We still have a long ways to go, but I think there's a good chance we'll prove you wrong :)

Do it. I want it badly. How are you getting around the problem of sales people guarding their inventory so closely? In addition, how are you coordinating with media companies to make sure that the brands advertising are within their guidelines?

Also co-founder at AdQuick here.

We work with sales people daily and getting their inventory to our customers. They love that we are bringing them new business. As for brand guidelines, we're in constant communication so this isn't much of an issue.

> They love that we are bringing them new business

If that's true that's great but it's the opposite experience of what I've experienced with large media companies. They pretty jealously guard their inventory and hate the idea of transparent pricing. That's great if you haven't experienced it yet, but I suspect you will at some point. Best of luck to you regardless. I'm rooting for you.

We don't list their pricing publicly and only share inventory on a per-campaign basis similar to how they currently sell using PDFs and Excel files.

So my buddy and I have had this idea for years, but have consistently hit roadblocks for an adwords-like product with billboards. To my knowledge, outside of Lamar, every major player in the outdoor advertising space doesn't even have the technology in place to allow for a more granular pricing model (i.e. ads by the hour). And when talking with them, they were not keen on allowing such a thing to exist even when we tell them we'd fill their entire inventory. Maybe you've had a different experience? If so, I'd like to chat with you.

As for AdQuick (and Fliphound for that matter), it seems like you're just another middleman. There is no bidding. Am I missing something?

This is great, I've been thinking about this idea for years (as an outsider) and I just love that you've brought the challenges to this idea front and center.

Google in the past had Adwords for magazine and radio ads built into the product. It wasn't a bad idea, it failed because the timing was completely wrong. In those days, online advertising was super cheap and print/radio was expensive. We performance advertising guys were making $50 in profit on a $10 online ad buy. Print was so worthless at the time there was the saying: What is the difference between buying print ads and setting money on fire? Burning the money provides some heat.

Now that ad prices have more sanity and relative value across mediums, now may be the time to do this.

I see this as an idea that will happen, it is just a matter of when.

I'd start buy building a big data model to value billboard space. Estimate the eyeballs using traffic data, size, visual competition, etc. Sell the analysis, broker space, and then in 5-10 years you could build the Adwords model and eventually own the whole damn industry. You could also sell the company to an Ad Agency at any point.

I’ve worked on this in London recently, presenting my working concept (and months of data in tableau by location behind it) at a few events. The industry is a few years off it, particularly the physical tech, which would require digital screens to be hooked up to an ad server of sorts (that doesn’t really exist programmatically either) and then serving custom ad formats (non IAB format) in real-time (taking in variable factors that could effect the demographic and/or volume of eyeballs). Measurement of the eyeballs and said demographic is the gap, though that’s more than currently exists in the Out of home market right now(nothing!).

It has legs, you just need serious commitment from an owner of inventory (physical boards), which are controlled by 3 or 4 organisations.

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