Ayuda Adds Zest To OOH Ad System Offer

April 30, 2012 by Dave Haynes

The orange-mad folks at Montreal-based Ayuda have launched a new service called Zest, timed for the start of the TAB/OAAA OOH Media Conference this week in Miami.

The product is aimed primarily at roadside OOH companies, presumably the many, many smaller ones who may have great locations but few of the back office technologies and resources of the big boys like Lamar, CBS Outdoor, JC Decaux and ClearChannel. This gets their avails online and adds the kind of sophistication the big boys can offer.

Says the release:

Zest is an off-the-shelf product that roadside OOH companies snap into their websites, automatically importing real time avails and detailed asset information so that buyers can discover, build a proposal, compare, plan, and buy available inventory online.

A groundbreaking feature of Zest is that it automatically imports Eyes-On audience measurement data from the TAB (Traffic Audit Bureau), while integrating with the media vendor’s existing inventory and charting system. This provides buyers with the industry’s only outdoor online buying experience that offers both hyper local cherry-picked buys, in addition to allowing local agencies to execute media buys based on audience reach and frequency. 

“Zest makes it as easy for OOH companies to market their available inventory to existing and potential customers, as it is to shop for anything else online nowadays,” explains Daniel Fleischer, Ayuda’s Director of Business Development. “Ayuda is in a unique position to help bring the outdoor vendor and buyer together online in a meaningful, practical way, because it was Ayuda that designed the TAB’s Eyes On ADS and Web Services engine, which allows outdoor companies to automatically retrieve reach and frequency information for their billboards, regardless of what inventory management system they run.

Zest connects at runtime to import TAB Eyes-On data, while retrieving live avails from the vendor’s inventory and charting system, whether that is Ayuda’s own BMS product or that of a third party. Zest allows the buyer to set campaign goals based on location, budget, or who’s looking at the billboard, and therefore helps both the local business owner easily buy advertising based on, say, local proximity to the business, while also allowing agencies to quickly plan a regional buy based on TRP (target Rating Points) objectives.”

Zest is a fully packaged website module that plugs into the outdoor company’s existing site, and imports avails from whatever internal inventory management system is in use. It then presents avails and Eyes-On data in user friendly interactive maps online, in any browser, mobile device, or tablet.

Burkhart, an outdoor ad company with thousands of faces around the midwest, has signed on as a Zest user, Ayuda also announced.

The digital OOH connection to Zest is probably best described as tenuous, but you could imagine as much or most of the analog stock goes digital, it could be run through Zest.

 

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