Firefly lights up city streets with HD full motion smart screens on top of rideshare vehicles and taxis. The eye-level and situationally aware ad format can deliver creative messages based on location of the vehicle, weather, time of day or week. Firefly helps brands connect with audiences where they live, work, shop, commute, and more. We spoke with Firefly’s Matt Wilkinson.
What are some recent company highlights?
Using our industry-first measurement methodology, we recently launched a brand new initiative called Street.IQ. It draws on live data for weekly optimization, allowing near real-time analysis and adjustments of campaign variables to ensure the best possible outcome for brands. The product, which measures campaign performance against brand objectives, can understand what time of day, day of the week, location and screen creative, resonates most with the audience and adjust the campaign to those elements to improve results over the length of the campaign.
We are constantly trying to revolutionize the OOH space, and this latest effort allows customers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns against standard digital objectives such as app downloads, website visits, and footfall behavior such as in-store visits. We’ve seen some amazing results working with brands such as Colgate, Puma, Dunkin’, and Allbirds.
Which verticals do you work with most?
We cover a full spectrum of brands but we’ve recently had particular success in the DTC, Entertainment, Financial, and Retail categories.
What are your data capabilities?
Firefly uses a first-party locational DMP that provides real-time city block (smaller than a census block group) level data attributes such as demographic and audience indexes, weather, traffic, POI, events, and sports results to deliver contextually relevant ads. We also utilize opt-in mobile location data to power Street.IQ to measure and optimize these ads.
How have you seen the digital OOH landscape change over the last few years?
We’ve seen a much larger push for metric based campaigns. People are expecting, and should expect, the same kind of measurement that they receive in other digital formats. By nature of our fleet constantly moving, and pairing our internal data with other data partners, we get incredible insights into where people are in real time, at a very granular level. We leverage this information to improve campaign results giving clients more confidence in OOH.
How has COVID-19 changed your outlook on OOH?
Most of our fleet was rideshare pre-COVID. Rideshare was down over 92% in March of 2020 but our fleet shifted in real time. As demand for deliveries increased over COVID, our fleet moved heavily into delivery services. That has helped us gather some pretty awesome first-party data to help optimize campaigns. It also ensured ads were being delivered to the neighborhoods where people were spending their time.
OOH is going to have a blockbuster 2H of 2021 as there is so much pent up demand for inventory in anticipation of getting back to normal across the US later this year.
What do you value most in your partnership with Place Exchange?
The highlights for us are collaboration, especially with regards to creating media plans to achieve client goals, our teams are amazing at getting together and working together to solve client problems and we love that! The open feedback loop, our open communication with each other mean that collaboration is easy. And the consistent communication with bi-weekly calls and slack channels. A team that is very easy to communicate with via a number of channels means the working relationship is seamless.