AdQuick wants to make it easier for brands to buy out-of-home ads, and has secured $2.1 million to develop targeting and measurement tools.

Alexis Ohanian's Initialized Capital led the new funding and Ohanian is also joining the company’s board.

Digital-first brands like Lyft, Instacart, and Peloton are increasingly tapping billboard advertising to spread awareness, said AdQuick's CEO and cofounder Matt O'Connor.

Digital advertising budgets are exploding, but that doesn't mean brands are getting the kind of metrics and stats out of their media buys that they should be.

That's the argument of Matt O'Connor, CEO and cofounder of AdQuick, an advertising startup that on Monday announced $2.1 million in Series A funding led by Initialized Capital. The venture capital firm — started by Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan — also funded AdQuick's seed funding with $1.1 million last year.

O'Connor's company provides software to advertisers and media buyers that purchase billboards and out-of-home signage. The idea for the two-year-old company came from his experience working in marketing at Instacart where he would buy billboard ads but not know how they performed compared to data-heavy digital buys on Facebook and Google. Plus, the out-of-home industry is still dominated by manual ways of buying ads like spreadsheets and email.

"We heard it worked but we couldn't confidently increase the budget for that channel because [the feedback] was just anecdotal," O'Connor said.

Specifically, he said brands aren't spending in second or third-tier markets outside of big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago "because it's hard to discover" ad placements in those markets. "When you get into some of these other markets, the customer-acquisition costs are around $1 — that's where we're seeing a lot of direct-to-consumer brands look at outdoor advertising."

AdQuick's platform lets advertisers zero in on out-of-home placements sold by 800 to 1,000 companies in the US. Advertisers can zero in on inventory in specific areas, set budgets and plug in analytics and measurement tools to quantify campaigns. For example, Google Analytics and image recognition tools keep tabs on the number of people who visit a brand's website or take a photo of the ad and share it on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. Advertisers can also run mobile ads using so-called geofencing targeting around billboards through AdQuick's technology to analyze people who saw both a billboard and a digital ad.

AdQuick's software helps brands buy billboards. AdQuick

Brands are getting smarter with billboards

Specifically, O'Connor sees a big opportunity with voice technology and digital billboards equipped with Amazon Alexa and Google Home built into them. Instead of hoping someone will remember an ad after they pass it, they'll eventually be able to ask the billboard to ping more information to their phone.

"People will just be able to say download that Coke coupon, or they'll be able to act in the moment," he said. "Outdoor advertising is going to catch up on the backs of digital technology."

There's also an algorithm behind the platform that taps into digital tactics like lookalike modeling to help brands plan out-of-home campaigns close to specific groups of consumers. A brand that runs a successful campaign in Brooklyn, for example, may not know how to find a similar audience in Dallas. "Our planning algorithm suggests [placements] and then overlays the available inventory and where the best pricing is around the country," O'Connor said.

According to O'Connor, digital-built clients like Lyft, Peloton, FanDuel and yes, Instacart, are shifting ad dollars to out-of-home because they feel like they are getting squeezed out of digital advertising.

"To use that old Yogi Berra phrase, it's getting so crowded, 'nobody goes there anymore,'" he said. "Brands are more and more looking for other outlets for their marketing budgets as it gets more expensive online."

Ohanian is both an investor and a user

When Ohanian's wife and tennis champion Serena Williams returned to work after giving birth, Ohanian made a splash by purchasing four billboards in Palm Springs, California, with copy that read "the greatest momma of all time" through AdQuick.

These just went up on I-10 into Palm Springs. @olympiaohanian & I wanted to welcome her back to tennis. Designed them myself, with some help from Jr. #GMOAT A post shared by Alexis Ohanian Sr. (@alexisohanian) on Feb 27, 2018 at 7:23am PST Feb 27, 2018 at 7:23am PST

"I used it like any other customer—I didn't tell them I was doing it," he said. "I'm sure once I uploaded the artwork they had a hunch on who was looking for ads around Palm Springs."

Ohanian is no stranger to billboard advertising though, which is why he said he was interested in AdQuick.

"I've bought a lot of billboards over the years," he said, citing his work protesting bills like SOPA and PIPA. "The process is really antiquated and it seems really ripe for some kind of software improvement."