Adgile Secures $5M to Make OOH Ads More Precise
Out-of-home advertising entered the digital advertising era with some doubts. The challenges of attribution and measurement have caused major brands to hesitate before making big investments.
At the same time, OOH does give brands a way to reach large groups of people with engaging visuals and powerful messaging — something other digital channels haven’t been able to offer at scale.
Adgile Media Group, an OOH advertising startup that aims to solve for physical-world attribution, has just raised $5 million in seed funding to bring precise data to OOH advertising and convert last-mile delivery trucks into mobile billboards for brands nationwide.
Brand Foundry Ventures led the round, with additional participants including Amity Supply, Finn Capital Partners, Consumer Ventures, and Niche Capital. Everlane founder Michael Preysman, Rothy’s executive Chris Hull, investor and entrepreneur Hannah Bronfman, Nik Sharma, and KBP Brands co-founder Barry Dubin also took part in the round.
Adgile’s vision for OOH ads
Founded in 2018 by Tom Shea and Max Flannery, Adgile is looking to bring data and attribution to the world of OOH advertising by solving for physical-world attribution. The company wraps last-mile delivery trucks on behalf of brands to help them reach their ideal customers and measure the return on investment using geo-location technology.
Adgile currently has just under 100,000 units of inventory under management across 50 U.S. markets, using a fleet of trucks to provide brands with a platform to drive their marketing communications efforts.
Having investors from major direct-to-consumer brands like Everlane and Rothy’s could help Adgile develop stronger roots within that community, allowing the startup to fill a niche in what is otherwise seen as a crowded market.
“From launching direct campaigns with these companies to learning about the strengths and weaknesses of other formats of advertising these companies are using, these investors are already helping us to understand our target customer on an even deeper level,” Flannery says.
Adgile’s post-seed future
Adgile will use its new round of funding to increase the depth of the company’s geographic presence, expand its branding, advance the development of proprietary technology, and recruit qualified new hires across sales, data science, and engineering. The startup already has partnerships with a number of trucking companies, which Flannery believes to be the best-performing trucks in each DMA.
“Trucks are essentially everywhere in the United States, yet our ability to use both our relationships and technology to select the most performant trucks enables us to deliver the target audience desired by our clients,” Flannery says. “Whether it is the rural countryside, suburbia, or city center, Adgile can execute a campaign to achieve an advertiser’s marketing objectives.”
Having secured its seed round funding of $5 million, Flannery says Adgile is positioned to reinvent the classic OOH approach.
“The future of out-of-home could not be brighter. From the emergence of technology platforms making tracking and attribution possible, to the subsiding of the pandemic, and the desire of many brands to have real-world visibility, out-of-home advertising is only growing,” Flannery says.
Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.
