Outdoor Ad Startup ADstruc Launches A New Ad-Buying Workflow And Partners With Telmar

ADstruc has been working to modernize the buying of outdoor advertising for the past couple of years. Now it’s taking two big steps in that process with last week’s launch of the new ADstruc platform, and today’s announcement that it’s partnering with ad software maker Telmar.

CEO John Laramie told me that the new platform builds on the services that ADstruc already offers, but the company describes the new platform as not just a new feature or tool, and instead “a complete workflow solution” offering “the easiest way to buy and sell outdoor advertising” like billboards. Agencies and other advertisers can post requests for proposal (RFPs) for their campaigns, and outdoor ad companies can bid to participate. The advertisers can actually browse the bids in a map, narrow down their search based on different criteria, and even see what their ad will look like in a given location. It’s a big change, Laramie said, from an industry where most of the campaign planning happens on spreadsheets.

ADstruc Proposal View

Once a campaign is running, ADstruc also offers a product called ADtrack that maps geo-tagged tweets along with the ads, so advertisers can see whether the ads are driving online conversation. Normally, , once a billboard goes up, “nobody has any idea” what’s going on, Laramie said.

As for the Telmar partnership, he said Telmar is one of the leading suppliers of media advertising software, used by more than 10,000 agencies around the world to do their planning. Basically, agencies can now do their planning on Telmar’s TOPS system and their buying on ADstruc, because they can post RFPs directly from TOPS to ADstruc. That should help the startup get more traction with traditional ad agencies, and Laramie said it’s also a sign that the company wants to work with the existing industry players rather than completely disrupt them.

There are more than 1,000 companies operating on the ADstruc platform, which Laramie said equals about 80 percent of out-of-home ad inventory in the United States. Revenue is doubling quarterly, he added.

And by the way, even though a lot of the new tools are built mainly for agencies, small businesses and startups can also use ADstruc to buy billboard ads.