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Carvertise’s new deal is a big bet on advertising transparency

December 4, 2024 |By Katie Tabeling

Carvertise recently partnered with StreetMetrics to provide more accurate and real-time metrics to vehicle-based advertising clients. l PHOTO COURTESY OF CARVERTISE

WILMINGTON — Carvertise is looking to change the game when it comes to vehicle-based advertising with a new partnership with StreetMetrics designed to deliver accurate marketing impressions to as close as real time impressions as possible. StreetMetrics is a media and technology company that uses GPS data and analytical models on weather, road conditions, construction

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WILMINGTON — Carvertise is looking to change the game when it comes to vehicle-based advertising with a new partnership with StreetMetrics designed to deliver accurate marketing impressions to as close as real time impressions as possible. StreetMetrics is a media and technology company that uses GPS data and analytical models on weather, road conditions, construction and pedestrians to help boost out-of-home ad agencies ability to give customers a more accurate representation of marketing impressions. For a company like Carvertise, which specializes in wrapping cars with vinyl advertising, a partnership with StreetMetrics is the next frontier – and Carvertise Co-Founder and CEO Mac Macleod intends to blaze the trail. Carvertise is the first company to use StreetMetrics as its formal impression currency, according to company representatives. Each client is now provided return of invest analysis through attribution studies for each campaign, offering in-depth studies on result-driven outcomes such as website visits, store visits and app downloads, as a standard for every campaign. “Everyone in the industry keeps and creates their own math, and obviously that creates conflicts. What we did in the past was we looked at research on vehicle advertising exposure and made a well-informed assumption,” Macleod said. “But it’s a static assumption that we apply to all campaigns, no matter if it's in Wilmington or Los Angeles, sunny or summer.” “We’re betting that our clients are going to value that accountability and transparency more than inflated impression numbers,” he continued. Carvertise, a company that wraps cars in vinyl advertising and uses a GPS app to log drive time in client-designated areas, used to solely rely on an impression count determined by modeling assumptions based on driving times from the Federal Highway Administration. One of the major appeals for clients, whether they’re small HVAC companies or law firms or regional or national companies like Netflix and 7-Eleven, is the ability to have Carvertise drivers “swarm” highly-populated areas, sport events or concert venues where several wrapped cars drive one after another like a street version of the game “Snake,” to catch people’s attention. But after a decade in business, Macleod realized that the out-of-home marketing industry was at a crossroads. “You pay attention to what your clients are saying, and we started to notice that we needed to offer a distinction from the market,” he said. “It’s almost like chicken and the egg; we gain enough market experience to realize there’s two distinct paths we can go. We can get really really into market saturation where more cars do more swarms. The second option is to go for precision, where you know your target demographic really well.” StreetMetrics, founded by Drew Jackson, offers a key piece to the puzzle of precise data. The company was born after Jackson spent time selling advertisements on his family-owned semi-trailers and was searching for a way to quantify the performances of those advertisements. By using modeling of weather, road conditions, construction and traffic patterns, the company now offers future modeling and close to real time advertisement performance. Carvertise Vice President of Business Development Jim Fischer told DBT that, so far, clients pretty easily catch on to how groundbreaking this technology will be to their marketing campaigns. Fisher was the main connection between the companies, as he met with Jackson four years earlier. “It’s easy to grasp the understanding of technology because the idea of impressions is so mainstream now. Now that this has been brought to light, they’re learning that there’s often not a third party offering that validation,” Fischer said. “In the last couple of months we’ve started to integrate attribution reports for every campaign for clients.” Right now, most of the information has been shared “word of mouth” from Carvertise representatives to clients, but Fischer believes, just like Macleod, that it will spread like wildfire once it catches on in the market. “We’re the only ones opening up the closet and telling people to come in and look. I do think it’s going to take time, because it’s not like we’re running Super Bowl commercials, we have to celebrate that news. When we tell 10 people, it turns into 100 people slowly over time,” he said.