Captivating Consumers on the Move with Adgile Media Group’s Tom Shea

Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is having a moment. More and more brands are recognizing the value in OOH, especially truck-side advertising, where vehicles serve as moving billboards. 

One company that’s raising the bar within the OOH space is Adgile Media Group. They’re a tech-enabled, truck-side media company that works with all-star ecommerce and retail brands like Studs, Nopalera, and Pepsi to bring eye-catching, trackable, impact-driven, brand creative on the ground.

To learn more about how Adgile’s tech-first approach to this traditional ad format accelerates visibility for brands, we sat down with cofounder and CRO Tom Shea.

Let’s roll!

The Road to Adgile

Tom Shea and Max Flannery started Adgile in 2018. While the initial product leveraged trucks for advertising, it was much more complicated than what’s on the market today. Originally, Shea aimed to put digital screens on trucks, enabling them to flip ads throughout the day. 

He wrote software to make the ads contextually aware and traceable for tailored messaging. “For example, if a truck was around mothers, it would display an ad for a diaper brand. Whereas, if the truck was circling Madison Square Garden, an ad for a beer brand would appear,” explains Shea.  

However, when Shea and Flannery started fundraising, they ran into a few issues—notably the feasibility and cost of the truck side screens. 

Eventually, Shea and Flannery realized the real problem at hand for brands: Attribution. 

They decided to spend two and a half years tinkering and iterating on the initial idea, which led to Adgile: a tech-enabled Out-of-Home (OOH) company that turns last-mile delivery trucks traveling the densest, urban areas into mobile billboards on behalf of consumer brands.

“I credit our success to staying in the ring long enough. That’s when the problem exposed itself to us.”

Reinventing the OOH Advertising Wheel

Adgile takes a tech enabled, data driven approach to traditional OOH advertising. The company took off after Apple's iOS 14.5 update, which disrupted attribution tracking systems, leading brands to seek out new ways to reduce CACs.

“At the beginning, brands would come to us, looking to diversify their marketing mix and seeking out new channels that would move the needle,” says Shea.  

How does Adgile drive brand awareness and conversions? The secret lies in their data-tracking infrastructure. 

First, each Adgile truck is geofenced and leverages a callable API that continuously streams the vehicle’s real-time location while capturing anonymized data from mobile phones with location services enabled. 

This data serves as the foundation for Adgile's technology stack, enabling them to extract valuable consumer insights for their clients.

“We can isolate your unique number of conversions through our technology”  

Use Cases

Adgile partners with brands that are looking to amplify brand awareness, expand their retail presence, or ventureinto retail for the first time. They provide actionable customer attribution metrics as well as empower a brand’s overall marketing mix. 

What does that partnership look like in practice? Adgile analyzes the performance & historic routes of each truck in its fleet and maps it against POI’s (points of interests) supplied by the brand.

Adgile then provides the client with several truck options to optimize the success of the campaign. Once the selection process is complete, the trucks are wrapped with the brand’s creative and the campaign is live! During the campaign, Adgile monitors the health of the creative through routine check-ins with its trucking partners. With every campaign that goes live, Adgile collects more insights on the performance of its fleet (i.e., which asset generated the highest level of exposures). 

Another exciting use case for Adgile? Supporting new product launch campaigns. According to Shea, the team has seen a ton of success in this respect, especially for brands looking to quickly launch products at a low CPM. 

“Our ad format is extremely unique. We have a deployable asset that can be used towards experiential activations. That’s rare.” 

Gearing up for Success

What types of brands are prime Adgile customers? The team usually looks to partner with two main types of brands: 

1. Brands with an ecommerce-first strategy and 5,000+ daily website hits
2. Brands with a retail-first strategy and 50+ points of distribution in a single market

“With these brands, we can access the level of data required to drive statistically significant outcomes,” he explains. “But, there are always exceptions.”

After partnering with all sorts of brands, the Adgile team discovered that their model is extremely effective for beauty and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands as well as owned retail and franchise groups. When it comes to beauty, one of the brands they’re super proud to work with is Glossier. They’ve run multiple, national campaigns with Glossier to support its store launches, Sephora debut, and limited edition holiday items. When asked about their favorite CPG campaign, Tom fondly mentions Ghia, Adgile’s first-ever client and a cult-favorite non-alcoholic aperitif brand.

For this initiative, Ghia partnered with Adgile to execute a 5-truck, 12-week advertising initiative in both Los Angeles and Chicago. The trucks prominently featured captivating, close-up shots of Ghia's best-selling products.

The results? An impressive 91% increase in conversion rate. Additionally, the campaign drove a significant 78% lift in homepage visits, showcasing the effectiveness of Adgile's approach in capturing consumer attention and driving engagement. Ghia has continued to partner with Adgile. 

“At Adgile, we sell trust first, media second.” 

Data-Driven Acceleration

Traditionally, the scope of data reporting for OOH ad performance has been primarily limited to measuring impressions/reach and CPM. However, with Adgile, brands can track campaign performance using a wide range of metrics including website traffic lift, conversion lift, web cost per visit, lifetime value to customer acquisition cost (LTV to CAC) ratio, return on ad spend (ROAS), and more.

Regarding benchmarking campaign success, Shea suggests that a good brand campaign typically achieves a LTV to CAC ratio of 1.5-2x. “For this format of brand marketing, it is especially important to make sure the consumer is engaged. It has to be memorable for them because they can’t click on anything on the spot,” explains Shea. 

Data reporting is a priority for marketers.. The Adgile team understands the value of comparing campaign data from Adgile to the brand’s direct response campaigns on platforms such as Facebook and TikTok. This enables marketing  teams to gain valuable insights and make informed decisions based on the overall performance of various advertising channels.

“We contextualize what success means in this unique marketing channel.” 

Musings on Behavioral Psychology and Brand Creative

The Adgile team has a great understanding of consumer psychology and the ways it plays into OOH.

After running a long-form behavioral psychology study, the team discovered that around 96.3% of consumers hold a positive perception of vehicle ads and the brands behind them, including the perception that the brand has full ownership over its supply chain and media presence, as well as the belief that the brand's products must be popular with their neighbors.

“We’re far more impressionable than we’d like to believe,” says Shea. “At Adgile, we are seeing an outsized return for not only ecommerce engagement but also retail and other paid media formats, like click-throughs on Facebook.”

Shea also points out that the team has become more and more involved in brand creative over time. Why? Campaign success heavily relies on creative efficacy. Plus, it’s a business risk. 

For instance, colors play a critical role in OOH ads. Anecdotally, Shea has an interest in color psychology. He applies his learnings when he’s working with clients on their ad creative. This attention to detail has positively impacted Adgile’s campaign outcomes. 

A notable example of this would be Adgile’s campaign for INDOGGO, a gin brand created in partnership with Snoop Dogg. The brand’s Adgile campaign ran for 3 months in 2021 in NYC. It consisted of vibrant, eye-catching creative featuring a monochromatic spread of gin bottles and Snoop Dogg. The entire campaign was run in a sophisticated shade of purple, the least naturally occurring color in society. “Purple is only found in sunsets and flowers, and so by using the color in a large format, you create contrast in the market just by showing up,” explains Shea. 

The campaign not only achieved INDOGGO’s brand awareness targets; it also exceeded Adgile’s initial forecasted outcomes and drove incremental holiday sales volume in 2021. 

“If you’re committing to doing something in a large format in the physical world, your goal should always be to stand out in a big way.”

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