UZE Mobility & The Future of Digital Out of Home Advertising
By: Uze Mobility
Tags: Startup, Mobility, Data, Advertising, Transportation

By Alexander Jablovski, Founding Partner, CEO & CTO at UZE Mobility

When I came to the U.S. from Germany to study aerospace engineering in the late 90’s, I was sure one day I’d fly the space shuttle for NASA. Due to an unfortunate car accident and a lingering issue in my shoulder, I decided to shift to automotive. And, what I realized after years of working with global brands like Daimler, BMW, Ford, Mercedes and Metalsa was that the next frontier in innovation isn’t up there in outer space where spaceships fly. It’s down here on the pavement, where cars and trucks carry products and people and information from one place to the next.

American drivers spend about three hours a day behind the wheel. The vast majority of them will cover more than 10,000 miles-worth of road in just one year. While COVID has cut back on time spent commuting to and from work, it’s not so drastically impacted retail. Drivers are still hopping in the car and heading to the store, turning the car into more of a buying mindset.

This isn’t exactly new news. For as long as people have been driving, advertisers have tried to influence potential buyers on the road. Until recently, they had a limited set of tools at their disposal: billboards, radio, graphics, and signage.

Now, that’s all going to change as we take UZE Mobility, the company I founded alongside Sebastian Thelen, into the U.S. and on the cusp of an explosive growth opportunity.

Mobility: An Untapped Market

Sebastian and I met while I was traveling the world for Metalsa, looking for disruptive startup ideas that we could invest in and nurture to maturity. For years, he’d been trying to help advertisers focus on quality rather than quantity in advertising. To that end, he’d designed an interactive screen that could be placed on the side of a car and controlled by way of an app.

Immediately, my wheels started turning. I’d been trained to think deeply about mobility over my years of experience working with global brands like BMW, VW, Ford and Mercedes. Mobility is a rapidly expanding space, but the variety of use cases (ride-sharing, car-sharing, delivery, etc.) all revolve around one model: get people and things from A to B.

What if we could create an ecosystem of digital business models around that singular model?

Right now, Amazon’s transportation fleet alone has more than 30,000 delivery vehicles. You probably drive by a handful of them every day. Now, imagine if each of those vehicles was outfitted with a brilliant 4K display capable of serving precise, relevant advertising to every driver, biker, and walker within viewing distance.

Do you see the opportunity there? Because we do.

But this opportunity in mobility is about more than slapping a monitor on the back of every delivery truck. To effectively serve relevant advertising that works (i.e., generates revenue for the advertiser and the client), you need digital infrastructure.

That infrastructure isn’t just lacking in the mobility space; the platforms that serve out of home (OOH) advertisers — digital and analog — are inefficient and ineffective at reaching the right people with the right message at the right time in the right place.

A Programmatic Way Forward

Digital OOH (DOOH) advertising has proven to be a highly effective way of reaching consumers. But all that depends on the advertiser’s ability to make the best use of available data to deliver a precisely targeted message to the consumer. Anything less, and it won’t matter how attractive your ad is; irrelevant advertising doesn’t convert.

In the DOOH space, the best way to connect advertisers and consumers is to adopt a programmatic solution — that is, a network or platform that integrates the entire value chain from ad creation and targeting to on-screen delivery. While many of the current DOOH marketplaces claim to offer such a solution, their chain is “broken” in that they rely on third parties to fill in key gaps (data, on-screen delivery, etc.).

UZE, however, has developed a truly unique marketplace that encompasses every link in the value chain, effectively linking ad agencies, 3rd party display providers, SSPs, and DSPs into a dynamic ecosystem capable of reducing ad buy time by 92%.

This efficiency translates to better conversion and higher returns for advertisers and their clients. How? By serving consumers with ads that are actually relevant to them and lives. Precise advertising means better and less marketing spam for all of us.

Proven and Proving

The numbers don’t lie. There are now thousands of displays connected to the UZE Marketplace in over 400 cities, capturing 90 % of the mobility digital OOH market in Germany. We’ve seen retail clients increase offline sales by 30%, online by 38%. We’ve also seen real estate agencies boost their sales by 20% and recruiters bump up applications by 45%.

As our platform continues to generate and synthesize more data, we anticipate even greater success for our partners in Europe and beyond. With Cindy Jeffers — former CEO/CTO of Salon.com and Technical Director at Huffington Post — running our U.S. operation, I am confident we’ll see rapid growth as new partners enter our ecosystem.

Scale is exhilarating, but my favorite proof of UZE’s viability comes from months ago in Bremen when a local butcher handed us some of his last euros, trusting we could help his flailing business survive COVID. Sure enough, we did. Just one ad (“Fresh sausages today!”) placed on every screen within a mile of his shop between 9 AM and noon was enough to remind people he was still alive, open, and ready to serve the neighborhood.

Another favorite? We partnered with Hövding to promote their mobile airbag for bikers. After running a bike with a giant screen through the bike lane in Berlin, Hövding saw their web sales jump to 38%. They were able to enjoy those kinds of results because we put the ad precisely where it needed to be: in front of the right person in the right place at the right time.

We’re Just Getting Started

Bremen and Berlin were the beginning. With the launch of our U.S. operation, we’re bringing UZE across the Atlantic and, eventually, to the entire world. There is a rich vein of revenue to be tapped in the mobility space. Our solution will not only provide immense value to advertisers and their clients; it’ll also create a new stream for our fleet partners, enabling them to fund future innovation and progress.

But mobility is about more than revenue. Imagine communities where boutique businesses can reach their ideal customers quickly and inexpensively or cities where leaders can reach their citizens with hyper-local updates that hit them where they live.

We all spend plenty of time in our cars, ready to take in whatever we see out there in our neighborhood and on the open road. Let’s get smarter with that attention and use it to create a new advertising ecosystem that moves our world forward.