Ep. 154 - Why Some SaaS Companies Are Turning to Billboards for Measurable Growth

Guest: Ty Tinker, Head of Analytics at AdQuick

What if everything you thought about billboard advertising was wrong?

Ty Tinker, Head of Analytics at AdQuick, breaks down the myth that out-of-home (OOH) advertising is unmeasurable and outdated. In reality, leading SaaS companies—including Dropbox, Salesforce, and Shopify—are embracing billboards, transit ads, and airport placements to drive brand awareness, accelerate sales cycles, and even generate measurable leads.

Ty reveals how brands are leveraging data science, AI, and sophisticated measurement techniques (beyond old-school QR codes) to track campaign performance. He also shares why smart SaaS marketers are treating OOH as a long-term investment, not just a one-off trade show play.

Key Takeaways:

📊 Out-of-Home Can Be Measured: Advances in mobile device tracking, mixed media modeling (MMM), and causal inference are proving OOH’s impact on website traffic, MQLs, and pipeline growth.

🚀 Credibility Wins Deals: Buyers shortlist SaaS vendors before ever visiting a website. Strategic OOH placements—especially at airports and conferences—ensure your brand is top of mind when it matters most.

🎯 The Right Placement Changes Everything: SaaS brands like Shopify and Shield AI are hyper-targeting decision-makers using billboards in high-traffic business areas, conference zones, and even airport walkways.

Want to see if out-of-home advertising fits your go-to-market strategy? Tune in now!

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Transcript

Jason: Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps revenue leaders of SaaS companies to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Ty Tinker. He's the head of analytics at AdQuick, an out of home advertising platform that simplifies the process of planning, buying, and measuring outdoor advertising campaigns.

Ty, welcome to the podcast. 

Ty: Thanks, Jason. It's great to be here. I'm really excited to talk with you today. 

Jason: So before we get into the questions, give me a little bit of background on AdQuick and what it is and who it's for and all that. 

Ty: Yeah. AdQuick is, as you mentioned, a platform for planning,

buying and measuring out of home campaigns out of home, of course, being a media channel that encompasses any media that's outside of the home. So not on your TV, not on your cell phone, but on billboards and planes and all other sorts of mediums, street furniture, et cetera. Wrapped cards, even those are popular now.

So AdQuick makes it easy to find that inventory. And playing campaigns against it at great scale. And then of course my neck of the woods is making sure that those units perform. 

Jason: And obviously, since we are a SaaS oriented podcast, interested in some of the examples that you've seen of SaaS companies using billboards and other non digital applications, right?

Ty: Yeah there's certainly a ton of use cases and a ton of SaaS companies are opting in right now. Some examples, and I'll give a shout out to AdQuick's creative library. You can just google AdQuick creative library, and you'll see a great set of examples. But those can include Dropbox, Salesforce.

monday.com, I have a billboard right outside of the place I'm staying right now for monday.com. Shopify is a huge buyer of out of home. So tons of folks are opting into the out of home channel and growing their spend within this channel. 

Jason: Fantastic. And then what do you typically do when you're working with clients to set objectives and KPIs?

I know that you, you like to talk about measurements, so let's dig right into like what that looks like. 

Ty: I uh, I gave a talk at one of the trade conferences for out of home where I was I was supposed to be joined by one of our VPs of partnerships. Unfortunately, he lived in Florida and wasn't able to make it.

So I told the audience, unfortunately, you're stuck with the data guy. So I'm going to have to talk about models. And that got a laugh but unfortunately it was true. So I love to talk data. That's I'm a data science data scientist. That's my background. Building recommender systems and figuring out how products get adopted and kind of ventured into the marketing space via out of home.

Reason being, I thought it was a really exciting problem to figure out how you can measure performance in the out of home space. And kind of through that lens of learned a ton, the goals vary, especially for SaaS. Typically they're focused on brand awareness, lead generation and some level of product or service adoption.

So when it comes to KPIs that, that we track. And we'll speak to this a bit more, but it's things like website traffic increased search volume. But also there's certain modeling that's approached right now that is more kind of focused on causal inference on lower funnel KPIs. So that actually could be quite directly MQLs leads on other lower funnel events.

So it's a mix, depending on the strategy, but everything can be measured. That's kind of my tag line. 

Jason: So can you walk us through or give us some examples of maybe billboards where they've been able to measure the impact to an MQL or conversion. And how does that look? Because I'm obviously we're not using QR codes.

Maybe maybe in the subway, but not in, but not on a billboard. 

Ty: Yeah. QR codes are interesting. It's usually the first question about measurement of out of home is do you do QR codes? And the answer is sometimes it's illegal to do QR codes on billboards on highways for the most part. For reasons that I probably don't need to explain.

So you need a pretty high dwell time in order to do QRs. So there's alternatives that are really effective. I think the second question usually is Does out of home have attribution? And when I say attribution, I mean user level tracking of conversion events. And the answer is yes. Attribution starts with mobile device ID tracking.

So this is basically mobile devices. So the devices, you know, iOS, Android. You have the opportunity or the option to opt in to tracking by apps. SDKs take that data and then provide that to aggregators who then are able to resell mobile location data to platforms and advertisers.

That's where attribution starts. And it kind of ends with connecting those signals from the real world to the digital world or to the retail world where you can connect someone's mobile device, ping their location data to a online event. So what does this mean? Basically you can see whether or not someone passed in front of a billboard and then subsequently visited a website and took an action on that website, which sounds great.

It sounds almost perfect, but this deterministic style of tracking is essentially non existent in a scaled format. Well, I shouldn't say non existent. It's possible, but it's very hard to procure incrementality or causality. And I'm going to use the same example of walking in front of a billboard and then visiting a website.

Let's say you're Shopify and you want to track in North America, you ran a campaign across 100 billboards. You want to see of those billboards. Did someone visit your enterprise commerce page? That's all possible. But the reality is, and I can say for myself, I live in a pretty crowded area. I walk outside all the time and happen to look at billboards sometimes, not every time.

So there could be this kind of natural let's say a fortunate. Event where I walk in front of a billboard, visit the website, but I already was happened to be a leader at my company who is deciding on enterprise commerce tools, and I never saw the billboard that's directional attribution data.

It's also kind of fraught with issues with opt in rates. So maybe in markets, you know, there may not be enough demand or opt in to sharing mobile device location data. So what I've been exploring and honestly shouting from the rooftops within my segment is to move maybe not fully away from attribution, but to consider alternatives that have been around for a very long time, including a couple of options, such as,

MMM or causal inference. Happy to jump into those kind of two options, but those are both privacy safe and don't require any user data. And also establish some level of causality when it comes to performance. 

Jason: Yeah, I would like you to go into a little bit more detail on those measurements and also some of the advantages.

That may not be apparent. So like, as you were just talking about, you know, going outside and potentially paying attention to billboards and sometimes you don't, but it is an advantage in that, like, if it's an ad that shows up in my LinkedIn screen and I don't pay attention to it, it's gone. Whereas if I'm walking past the same billboard every day.

Especially like if you have it up at a trade show or something like that, where you know that the audience is, it has a lot of staying power, but like, what are some of the other advantages potentially? 

Ty: Yeah, 100%. And I assume advantages of kind of leveraging the channel for, for SaaS. There's massive advantage in establishing credibility.

I just had a really great conversation with my VP of product. Everyone at AdQuick thinks about out of home and kind of the applications. One of the major strategies is conference targeting. Super, super effective and obviously like kind of a last point before conversion touch point. However, credibility is established over the life cycle of the buyer.

You're competing in, especially in SaaS, you're competing with a number of potential sellers. And in order to be front and center and top of mind when it comes time to make a purchase decision that takes a long time and it takes a lot of touch points. It's not going to be like we have a tons of 

D to C apparel companies that we work with who are really excited by out of home, but only kind of view it from a performance lens where did this ad lead to a conversion within a time period of two to four weeks.

That's and also speaks to some of the challenges of attribution. That is not the case for SaaS. The time to conversion is significantly longer. So it's almost not even useful to establish a window of a conversion period as it is to think strategically about how you're going to implement channels like out of home, which do what I mentioned before, which is like establish legitimacy, have a bit of a lower ad fatigue are very brand safe.

You're not going to. You know, have your digital placement next to other ads that you don't agree with or next, you know, next to necessarily competitors, you own a piece of real estate and you can communicate something to that real estate. Be a creative.

Jason: Can you share any insights or case studies on like SaaS companies that have successfully used maybe like airport or trends or transit advertising to reach their target audience? And just as a side note, you know, our president and I were in Chicago and saw this big ad on the side of the subway we thought was pretty effective.

It was for JIRA, I believe. 

Ty: Yeah. 

Jason: So, so definitely companies are using it, right? 

Ty: Yeah. 100%. Optimizely does quite a bit internationally as well as in North America. I'd say a really good example of like a strategic play was by Shopify. So Shopify does, a really big mix of kind of evergreen advertising, in the out of home space, a real world ads consistently for just kind of their, their new enterprise, newish enterprise tooling.

And while this is consistently kind of rolled out on one month to two month periods, which is the typical buying period for traditional out of home as opposed to digital programmatic. They're also targeting conferences, and the way they do that is by targeting airports where they know conference attendees who are leaders within the segment that they're targeting are going to be. They have to land there,

and so, especially when it comes to international travel. You're going through the airport, so it's best to kind of reach that last touch point, as I mentioned before before, you know, these leaders attend the conference and if nothing else, it's a conversation starter. Hey, I saw your ad in the airport and if you're in the space or if you're the correct target audience, you'll probably take something more away from that than, you know, a control group who may not be attending the conference at all.

So you may remember the tagline or some piece of the creative that stood out to you.

Jason: And typically in your experience, how do SaaS companies. justify budget allocation for out of home advertising compared to other channels. I don't imagine it's high on the priority list for some, but maybe comes up when they have a trade show. I don't know? 

Ty: Yeah. There's a variety of kind of reasons to take a stab at out of home.

I'd say like, it's almost better to understand. Why it may not be invested in in the first place out of home, typical investment for an advertiser ranges, especially for like larger scale advertisers for doing upwards of, you know, 10 to 100 million in spend on ads per year, usually about 5 percent of that budget.

Obviously we have incentive to encourage you know, increased investment in the channel itself, but there's a lot of hesitation around. Investing in out of home because it's hard to invest in what you can't measure. And out of home is historically seen as something that's challenging to measure. And that has been a big limiting factor.

What we've noticed is there's actually a really large transition right now to adopting these awareness channels that have been hard to measure for a long time, because their impressions or their investment is being incorporated into mixed media models. So MMM. MMM has served as one of the strongest benefactors to the channel because it is privacy safe.

It only factors in impressions and spend as well as other macro factors and does not require some form of deterministic attribution or mobile tracking to prove the effectiveness or at least the contribution of a channel. To certain outcomes, whether that be a lift in site visitation, lower funnel conversions, leads, MQLs, et cetera.

So that has been a huge supporting tool to incorporating out of home into the media mix. 

Jason: You said the attribution is a big reason that companies are hesitant because they don't want to put out something that they can't measure. At the same time, you know, we've just had a recent guests on our podcasts, including Kerry Cunningham from 6sense who wrote the recent report, that's basically saying that, you know, brand is no longer optional.

 When people come to your website in the SaaS world, they've already, you know, 90 percent have picked four or five vendors that they know that they've talked to peers about that make the shortlist. And, you know, all this outbound that we're doing really isn't moving the needle on that front. And so like, so this attitude of, well, I'm not going to do it if I can't measure it,

means that you are not interested in investing in the long term 

Ty: 100%. And I think about a recent example of an investment into a form of out of home. We don't list it on our platform, but you can obviously pay the name a stadium which is a form of out of home. And there was a recent, I don't even know what to call the transaction, but Daikin, which is like an AC provider from Japan, bought Enron Field formerly known as Enron Field, formerly known as Astro Field, formerly known as Juicebox Minute Maid Park.

And that's a massive investment. How do you measure that? You certainly don't do it with attribution. What would you do? Count all of the device IDs that ever attended a baseball stadium and then see if they convert. Well, yeah, you'd probably have a 100 percent conversion rate of everyone who opted in because at some point, those who convert within that Metro, I should say, have passed by or been in the vicinity of that part.

What you need to take a look at is how does this investment actually impact the buying decisions of our target? Our addressable market, and that can be done through a number of ways. It's hard to measure. I'm not going to say it's easy, but that can be done through kind of surveys. Obviously the life cycle of, of kind of these buying decisions is a long one.

And that starts with major investments into awareness and reach that are completely differentiated from your digital channels or your last touch attribution channels. 

Jason: What's funny, you bring up the stadium example. So I'm in KanSaaS City. We're talking now before the Super Bowl, so I'm not going to make any predictions.

But, you know, I looked at the Arrowhead Stadium one day and it said, GEHA Field. I'm like, what is GEHA? It's Government Employees Health Association. I'm not sure what benefit they're getting out of it by putting their name on the stadium, but I certainly didn't know their name, but I had to look it up.

Yeah. 

Ty: 100%. It's, and. Well, you know, what, what incentive do you have to go to their website? Otherwise, unless you're already in the target audience. And in that case, yeah, you're definitely aware of the competitors, but you're probably aware of who you want to use as a partner. You've made that decision, or at least you're already down the road of making that decision.

It's really interesting. I think the stadium example is a good one and this can be done. You don't have to buy a stadium. You don't have to put your name on the stadium. It's pretty expensive. You don't have, you don't have to buy the uh, the sphere in Las Vegas to get your name out there. And that's one of the strategies we recommend is kind of the opposite, still out of home.

But you can actually do some discovery of your audiences very early in your cycle. So one of the strategies that's employed kind of tricky to employ and hard to measure, but one is this figuring out points of interest where your target audience may be. That's why conference campaigns are incredibly popular for out of home because you have this concentration of individuals.

Or well within your market and you're going to have this high percentage of reach to that target audience, but you could do so kind of independent of conferences using audiences and out of home. Audiences are very interesting. They are kind of tracked by data marketplaces, but you can start to get creative with your audiences

to the point where you're highly targeted. One example is Shield AI, which is a kind of a defense contracting company does a ton of out of home and they're particularly interested in it because in DC, all of these representatives and really it's. I'd say like four or five people that they need to reach are going through an airport and they know which airport on a daily basis.

They have a pretty good idea of the movement of their audiences and the individuals that need to respond to their campaign. So they do perms in the airport. And it's very, it's not cheap, you know, it's, it's not but they can't directly target these device IDs. They don't even know who they are because device IDs are anonymized.

So the best way to do it is to ensure that they're going to see it right when they're on the moving walkway at the airport, one of the airports in DC. That's, that is a strategy. It's impossible to measure because your conversion metric basically it's binary. Did you, did you sell or did you not each year, but very effective.

They've, they've had a lot of success with out of home. 

Jason: Yeah. That's really interesting. 

So let's, that's a great segue into the next question too, is like, how does the creative approach differ for out of home, we often say that like your website hero is very similar to a billboard in that if you're not catching the attention

like right away, you're going to lose people, at least on the website, the web with a billboard, they're going to drive right past it and not even look at it, but you know, potentially more dangerous on the website hero. But you know, in terms of like writing a copy, what's different. 

Ty: I think the website hero is a great example.

And to be frank, I'm, I'm a data guy. I'm not necessarily in the creative world, but I do see some outcomes especially when it comes to add recall that come from having successful creatives. There's a few best practices. One is keep it short, seven words or less. You have six seconds. To engage and communicate something to your target audience.

So need to keep it short and readable. Another is high contrast and large fonts. This, I mean, fairly self explanatory when you're a hundred to 200 yards away from a roadside billboard, it needs to be readable. So readability is key. And then having some sort of specific call to action needs to be very direct.

I'd say it's. the impetus is lower when it comes to SaaS ads, if you're looking more kind of, you know, down funnel, or if you're a DTC company, yeah, focusing on some sort of like, "buy this now" makes sense. But if you're interested in establishing credibility, really just making sure that your logo and brand name is extremely clear and communicated well.

And if you do have something memorable that you want to leave with clients, for example, Shopify does quite a bit of is talking about how efficient. Their platform is so all of their taglines are about efficiency and how quickly something can be done and it's really just a set of tag lines. 

Jason: Do you have any specific examples that you can bring up that you know were successful campaigns? I'm sure the audience would love to hear some of these examples and maybe we can post some in the show notes as well.

Ty: For sure. I'll share some creatives from this campaign, but I do keep bringing back to the Shopify example. Shopify stood up a number of web pages for their enterprise commerce platform, were brand new and they had them live for about six months and weren't seeing any activity. And by any, I mean like a few hundred visitors per day.

So they needed that kickstart to kind of jumpstart side activity. What they did was pretty straightforward. It was a series of conference campaigns from the out of home space, as well as that evergreen advertising I mentioned before, with some really flashy show units, highlighting that their enterprise was alive in their enterprise conference tool existed.

It was, it was a kind of. Go to market strategy in a way. And so on uptick, that was obviously statistically significant. You really didn't need statistical measures to see how performant these ads were in driving site visitation 10X overnight and continued to grow thereafter. So a really effective way to basically say we're here, we're, we're, we're available and you can go to this website and take a look and see if it's real.

So that was an activation that was highly successful, easy for me to measure. 

Jason: Very cool. Talk about the role of data and technology, especially with AI entering. How are you leveraging that? What, what are you seeing there? 

Ty: Yeah. I think there's the sizzle and then I think there's the steak.

We do both. I think the sizzle right now is, we have a creative builder creative AI tool which I guess you can link in the show notes. I'm pretty sure it's public. But you can create an out of home Creative with some of the creative best practices built in to some of the parameters of the AI due to, you know, generate ideas for creative for your out of home campaign. So very exciting kind of image generation there. I think that's exciting, but it struggles with text. So, you know, your text may be a bit warped and read it when readability is so essential. I wouldn't go straight from creative to production without some oversight using AI.

I think as far as the steak goes, what I'm working on right now is in product we've had so much activity and engagement with units like. There's for context, there's a million units, a million ad units that you can buy today in North America of these units, we've engaged with hundreds of thousands of units, whether it be on our platform, which you can think of like Zillow, basically, you can zoom in, highlight units that you want to check out, make some notes about them, etc.

Some form of engagement with one third of those. And so that provides a really strong database kind of wrought with metadata about these units, the direction they're facing the lighting of that particular unit whether it's digital or static to build a recommender system. So if it's your first foray into out of home you can speak with our AdQuick GPT and ask what kind of strategy should I employ?

Then you can hop on the platform and say, here's the strategies I've selected. Please recommend me a few units that would make sense in the markets that I'm targeting. And then you can go to creative production and say, Hey, I'd like some ideas for creative. Please don't use the final version yet. We'll get there.

We'll get them cleaned up. But you can get some creative ideas that are going to be effective with the right kind of pillars called action for your particular brand. And then you can deploy. So, all of that is real AI solutions implemented into our platform, at least, that are helping to make the buying and measurement decisions for out of home.

Jason: Very cool. And then looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities for companies to leverage out of home advertising and what emerging trends or formats are you particularly excited about? 

Ty: Yeah. I think measurement is critical. And one of the most important measurement tools in your toolkit right now is not attribution.

It's two things. I'd say mixed media modeling and, and causal impact models are causal inference. Both of those require well, I'd say MMM more so requires some form of impression data. So as far as the future and really the critical component of measuring out of home, you need to have a really strong idea of how many people passed by and were likely at least had the opportunity to see your billboard.

Historically, that's been modeled and estimated fairly well, but with a level of fidelity or, or regularity, so, you know, you'd only see that on a four week basis, you'd see I get a million impressions over four weeks. That's not good enough to do mixed media modeling. So you need that on a daily basis.

So, we have a partner who is using satellite images to A, count the number of cars or vehicles that were within the vicinity of an ad using view sheds. And then subsequently filter out vehicles that were facing the wrong direction moving the wrong way or or otherwise unlikely to have seen the ad maybe due to lighting conditions shadows, etc. I see the industry moving in the direction of using this kind of data

that's privacy safe. It's not using mobile device IDs or user level data to inform models that then beget further investment into the channel. So that's one really big direction. I see the industry going is through measurement using this to optimize and playing campaigns.

Jason: Fantastic. Well, I think that's a good place to land the episode. If anybody wants to get ahold of you, what's the best way to do that? 

Ty: Yeah. I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me just linkedin.com/tytinker. I post fairly regularly and we'll be posting more. Otherwise you can search up my name.

I've, written a few things, but I'm, I'm hoping to write more kind of, as we move into this era of measurement and analytics being the forefront of decision making for awareness channels. 

Jason: Fantastic. And of course, if you'd like some help figuring out how to optimize your messaging for today's buyer, take us up on a free offer to do a messaging and marketing review.

We'll look at your website, messaging, content, advertising. Give you some ideas about how you can maximize some of those conversions. And we can also help you with that tedious billboard type writing and make sure that we get people's attention. when they're driving or walking by. So just reach out to me at jm@austinlawrence.com. And please, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do so wherever podcasts are distributed. Ty, thanks for joining us today. 

Ty: Thanks for the time, Jason.