James Heller

Is Amazon cooler than Apple? Or just more top of mind?

Wrapify’s business model transcends any previous “car wrap” business in ways both consumer- and brand-centric.

Technology and societal trends — crowdsourcing, the sharing economy, proprietary ad tech and analytics — are what’s made Wrapify a paradigm-shifting Out-of-Home platform for more than a dozen brands and marketers in eight cities in less than four months since our launch.

So it’s technology that is at the root of Wrapify’s success for brands, but it’s the collaborative human touch that is making Wrapify a breakout win with our on-the-road partners: our drivers.

Unlike any other car wrap company, drivers can pick the brand they want to work with, the advertiser they most feel in tune with when advertising on their vehicle. Petco, Harrah’s, Quest Nutrition, any one of the nearly 20 brands currently using the Wrapify platform.

One of the fun things we do with our drivers when they get on board is ask them not only which of Wrapify’s current marketing partners they’d like to feature on their vehicle, we ask the dream brand they’d wrap their car with — if they could pick the brand, which one would it be?

Most of us at Wrapify guessed Apple would be the #1 choice of drivers, but we were wrong; Apple came in at #2. The most popular response from a poll of 422 Wrapify drivers was Amazon, with 11.4% of responders choosing it. Apple received just under 10% Here’s the entire list: 

• Amazon – 11.4%
• Apple – 9.5%
• Monster Energy – 6.6%
• Nike – 5.9%
• Petco – 3.3%
• Google – 3.1%
• Coca-Cola – 2.6%
• Red Bull – 2.4%
• Wrapify – 1.9%
• Starbucks – 1.4%
• Disney – 1.2%
• Pepsi – 1.2%%
• Other – 49.5%
• TOTAL – 100%

Since it’s a wide-open question, not a multiple choice, nobody should find it surprising that roughly half the picks are brands that don’t garner even 1%.

Another couple observations: Interesting mix of technology companies and old-school brands. And that no matter how you slice it, Pepsi always ends up about half as popular as Coke. Maybe they should try Wrapify!

This is, of course, an unscientific poll of a select demographic — Wrapify is proud of our pioneering drivers, of our early adopters to this new technology-driven outdoor advertising paradigm…but we’re not saying they are the perfect cross-section of America, for precisely that same reason. But they make up a good indicator of what brands resonate with men and women who embrace change and new ideas.

Seems like a bunch of people are freaking out about Apple's new ad blocking technology. The company plans to let iPhone users who update to iOS 9 (the new iPhone operating system) block all ads seen through the phone's Safari web browser.

The ad-blocking tension between publishers and consumers is also escalating fast, with German publishing company Axel Springer — which recently acquired Business Insider — announcing Tuesday that it will be blocking readers who use ad-blocking technology like AdBlock or UBlock.  

How many of you already use an ad blocker? According to TechCrunch, only about 10% of Americans do right now, though the publication makes it sound like we’re late to the party: There are more than 200 million people worldwide who use one, including a full one-third of Greece (“And look where that’s gotten them!” I imagine one snarky ad-sales guy saying).

The Axel Springer move comes on the heels of Apple enabling ad blockers to work on its web-browser Safari. which is also the built-in browser for the iOS 9 update, which makes up roughly half the world's mobile market.

Though Apple has backed off somewhat from their position because of security concerns, it will probably just be a speed bump while privacy is preserved.  As Time magazine notes, this is all part of a larger battle between the titans of technology, Apple and Google, with Apple seeing an opportunity to undermine Google’s chief form of revenue.

I’m not here to weigh in on that battle of behemoths, but I would like to offer a couple thoughts on ad-blocking.

First and foremost, this probably wouldn’t even be a problem if the USA had broadband speeds matched the world’s best; instead we rank 17th in internet connection speed. If we had speeds that matched, say South Korea, Japan, Israel or….Latvia (?!?), web pages would not be slowed while loading with a half-dozen banners or skyscrapers, a pop-up and a pair of auto-play videos. And sometimes more.

And that’s the second thing: In their increasingly urgent efforts to make up revenue losses that come with the decreasing circulation of physical magazines, as well as diminished prices for online advertising, publishers are cramming more and more ads on to pages in order to make up the difference in revenue.

Is it unexpected that readers would want to escape an onslaught of advertising that slows and diminishes their digital experience, as well as tracks their online movement? Of course not. I suspect, in the end, it will be publishers who make it impossible for users of ad blockers to read their content who will suffer.

And advertisers, of course. As a new campaign from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America points, there is increasing concern from marketers about whether their advertising is even being seen by people on the web. “Feel the real,” the OAAA states.

We agree completely with the OAAA, and know Wrapify can be a big part of this “real”-ity. Wrapify vehicles go where people are — on the roads, in their cars, a captive commuting audience — and get seen. The data confirms it.

Because unlike most OOH advertising, Wrapify has the technology and data to provide the facts of how many people are seeing your campaign. For example: A two-month campaign of five wrapped vehicles for Petco yielded 3.2 million impressions in the San Francisco area.

So we see the growing clamor around ad-blocking technology as another highly encouraging sign Wrapify is entering the marketing marketplace at exactly the right time.

You can see Wrapify vehicles for Petco, Harrah’s and several other advertisers in five cities — San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange County — with three more hitting the road in November:  Phoenix, Seattle and Sacramento. It’s only the beginning, and it’s for real.

It might sound crazy to claim an ad campaign covered by The Wall Street Journal didn’t get enough attention. But it sure seems that way to me, for the recent and ongoing out-of-home “Feel the Real” campaign from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

“Feel the Real” is great advertising. Smart, straightforward, and effective use of the medium it touts to prove its primary point. On top of that, its timing couldn’t be more relevant, as the drumbeats quicken over concerns about Adblocking in the digital marketing space, suddenly even more urgent an issue than ads boosted by bot-views, near-hidden ad placements, and other inventive ways to digitally defraud.

Most admirably, “Feel the Real” follows what I consider the First Commandment of Advertising, laid down by its most wise high priest, David Ogilvy: The best advertising is truth well told.

And “Feel the Real” is most certainly truth well told. Its message is an undeniable truth, and self-evident. Out-of-Home (OOH) billboards, with simple words in black and white and sometimes red, state the obvious: “This ad is real. You are consuming an advertisement. You are real.”

Even a decade ago, that might have sounded absurdly meta, written by a copywriter while dropping acid. But in today’s too loose wild west of increasingly digital-driven marketing, it’s actually a call to arms and action.

Now, admittedly, I’ve got a dog in this fight—but I’m proud of the dog and see no reason to hide it. Our business, Wrapify, is going all-in on the OOH advertising market, and it is exactly because what our platform offers is real and tangible that we have seen such immediate acceptance and have already blown past our most optimistic projections for 2015.

So I cite Wrapify’s success not in self-promotion, but as corroboration of the outdoor medium’s resilient vitality—as well as validation of its current marketing by the Association that is supposed to best represent it. So, good job OAAA, and thank you!

But I’d like to help them out, too. The OAAA plays nice, saying that the best OOH campaigns work in conjunction with a digital experience, but they do point out that half of all digital advertising spending is wasted.

That’s a fact that can’t be said loud enough to the industry, even if the Association is too polite to scream it while banging a drum. They won’t quote the Fortune story that flat out stated digital advertising “Fraud is rampant.”  But I’ll do it for them.

61.5% of web traffic is not human. 100% of #OOH traffic is human. #feelthereal  ow.ly/SL23N pic.twitter.com/48ucPSkTjS

Everyone in marketing needs to get this through their head, even though it’s tough to wrap the mind around it. Half your digital spend is wasted. Half. Wasted.

Recently, Google admitted that 56% of ads are never seen. ComScore says 46%. Split the difference and we’re still at half.

It’s funny how all the old truths, stay true, just reinvented. The great early mass retailer John Wannamaker famously said, “Half my money spent on advertising is wasted,” and he was right. But he also said “The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Well, now we know. You’re wasting it on digital advertising.

$7 billion down the virtual drain honestly blows my mind, and I’m not sure how any brand CMO can justify it. There may genuinely be a level of denial, or institutional denial. But the truth is that the amount of money being wasted on digital marketing is positively absurd. It’s going to stop, at least a few billion of it, and that money is going to flow elsewhere.

The OOH market will almost certainly get a lot of it. The shift to OOH makes sense historically from a mass human behavioral perspective, applied to business: As new technologies are revealed to be not the salvation they were prophesied to be, there will be a retreat to the proven and true, the empirical, the real. And, as we’ve heard, with OOH, you can “Feel the Real.”

That is not to dismiss digital or technology. But people too should recall the futility of technology simply for technology’s sake, to prove “it can be done.” Smart technology is sometimes best used to build even better mousetraps for ideas already proven to work.

That’s what Wrapify offers. We’ve taken a rather old school way of marketing, wrapped vehicles, and added crowd-sourcing, the sharing economy, proprietary technology, and analytics, for a revolutionary OOH platform that deals a winning hand for everyone involved: Drivers, brands, the marketing experience.

Ordinary everyday drivers can pick the brand they want to partner with, get their cars wrapped in a day or less, then get paid regularly by the mile though a unique mobile application that tracks their movements. Brands get real-time visualized dashboards of cars’ impressions, so they know how many people are seeing them.  

Wrapify has the impression numbers to prove OOH works. To share but one campaign, for the national retailer Petco, Wrapify put five cars on the road in San Francisco for two months and received 3.2 million impressions. That’s more than billboards in the region receive.

We see a very vibrant and lucrative future for the outdoor industry, and look forward to be a revolutionary part of it. Wrapify believes in the “Feel the Real” campaign, because we know it to be true, and applaud the OAAA for this strong and eternally valid campaign.

Ad Tech Company Shows it Can "Bridge the Gap Between Digital and Out-of-Home," with Real-Time Data to Measure Impact of Its Wrapped Vehicles

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – October 07, 2015

Advertising technology company Wrapify is now making "impressions" data of its crowdsourced "wrapped" vehicles available to advertisers , highlighting the company's potentially transformative way to measure Out-of-Home advertising.

"The introduction of impressions and the unique underlying technology to the Wrapify platform 'closes the loop' with advertisers by providing meaningful feedback for current and historical Wrapify campaigns," says Wrapify's VP of Engineering Tim Flack. See Demo

The information shows five Wrapify cars for Petco made more than than 3.2 million impressions on roads in the designated San Francisco campaign region during a two-month period.

"We are happy with these results, and especially pleased to demonstrate Wrapify's ability to bridge the gap between online and outdoor advertising," Wrapify Chief Executive Officer James Heller said. "Wrapify has taken a novelty in the advertising world, wrapped vehicles, and created a viable way to create, manage and scale an outdoor advertising campaign on consumer vehicles nationwide."

Wrapify is the first ad platform with an iOS application that creates economic value to consumers by paying them through the use of a primary asset, their car. GPS tracks Wrapify drivers' daily commute and other time spent on the road and pays them by the mile. Their location is continuously chronicled by Wrapify's proprietary technology and analytics systems, and shared with advertisers in real time.

Heller said the ad tech company uses a variety of third party data to create a proprietary informational database that is continually updated and captured for display via digital dashboard (see attached screen caps/video). Impressions and mileage are displayed by month, weekday and hour in an array of chart visualizations.

"No one has been able to provide this level of data and data visualization to Out-of-Home marketers in the past," Heller asserted. "Advertisers will know how many people their messaging is influencing, and they will be able to scale accordingly."

Wrapify vehicles are currently on the road in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County and Atlanta, highlighting nearly a dozen brands, including Petco, Harrah's and Quest Nutrition.

About Wrapify
Wrapify is a disruptive advertising platform connecting drivers and brands to create powerful on-vehicle advertising. Through its proprietary mobile application and technology, Wrapify gives drivers an easy source of extra income, plus the power of choice of advertiser and "look," while offering brands the security of control and trackable results.

Read more: http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/15/10/p5895199/wrapify-impresses-through-impressions#ixzz3nuSvz0fD