The Slow Journey to the AdQuick Launch

I’ve recently set out with a few amazing co-founders (holler @ Fahim Ferdous, Stephen Wegner, and Connor Burden) on a journey to modernize the outdoor advertising industry. The company is called AdQuick and it’s been marinating for over 7 years.

AdQuick makes buying outdoor advertising faster, more targeted, and more measurable than ever before. By doing so, we also hope to make selling it easier, too.

What follows is a lot about how we got here and a sneak peak of where we’re going.

Rewind to 2010. I was bootstrapping a start-up called Footprint Free. We brought on our first customer and wanted to promote this. What better way than outdoor advertising? All I wanted was to see which options were available at what price for what timeframe. Simple right?

Weeks after submitting requests through multiple company websites, I finally heard back from one company. Instead of sending me options with pricing and details, I had to go through a consultation call where I relayed the same details I sent in my initial outreach. After our unnecessary phone call, the sales rep sent me an email with dozens of attachments called ‘photo sheets’ and separate attachments with pricing information. Comparing a dozen PDFs offline was a subpar UX, to say the very least.

Turns out that the $200 bucks I was looking to spend was too low for any of the available options. Instead, I bribed some friends (thanks Pat and Chuckie!) who lived in a high-visibility location with six-pack and some pizza. In return, they displayed our ad (see below). After that experience, the seed was planted.

Fast forward a few years to 2014–15. I joined Instacart and was part of the expansion team. We were the nomadic Seal Team 6 that swooped into markets, got Instacart up and running, spread the word as loudly as possible, then moved onto the next market. Time was always of the essence.

Entering a new market, our main goals were to delight customers with an amazing new service and make sure as many people as possible knew that Instacart arrived?—?and do it fast. We expanded from 3 to 12 markets in 8 months.

When our team looked into purchasing outdoor advertising, the launches came and went before we could get quotes for available inventory in our launch markets. We would deploy our budgets in faster-to-execute channels, like digital marketing.

Seemingly nothing had changed in 5 years.

When I left Instacart to go to Amazon, the idea continued to gnaw at me. While driving from Houston to New Orleans in March of last year, the highways were littered with ‘Your Ad Here’ billboards. The lost value from the locations I saw first hand was in the millions of dollars annually. After doing some more diligence on the industry, I learned that at any given time, 30–40% of outdoor advertising is vacant (or ‘remnant’)?—?$13.3Bn globally.

In my view, this excess supply was due at least in part to lack of distribution.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. During a hazy Bourbon street conversation, the concept came up in conversation with the groom. He happened to be indirectly connected to a major player in the industry. After some nagging and borderline-stalking follow up, I was able to secure a meeting with Wally Kelly, the former president of CBS Outdoor Advertising.

While the idea was still nascent, there was no fundamental reason that the idea for AdQuick wouldn’t work. In fact, Wally shed some light on the vestiges of the way things work in the industry that emboldened me to give AdQuick a proper shot.

I’m elated to be working with my co-founders and excited by our early customers’ feedback from both sides of the market. We’ve got a lot more in store so stay tuned by signing up at AdQuick.com.