Carvertise’s partnership with StreetMetrics will give its partners more accurate, actionable data on who sees their brand message.
WILMINGTON – Carvertise has entered into a partnership that lets it provide customers for its fleet of wrapped rideshare vehicles real-time, third-party tracking of advertising impressions and performance metrics using GPS and mobile devices for more accurate data.
Prior to entering into the new partnership with StreetMetrics, Carvertise – like its competitors in the “Moving Out-of-Home” (OOH) advertising industry — pitched brands on the idea of promoting their messages using assumption-based traffic data predicting how many people (pedestrians and other vehicles) would see those messages over a given one-mile stretch, says CEO Mac Macleod.
OOH advertising includes billboards, street furniture, transit advertising (buses, trains, airports), and alternative formats like wrapped cars. The concept behind StreetMetrics’ approach isn’t new, but it is for Macleod’s part of the OOH industry.
Advertisers, agencies, and media companies created a nonprofit organization called the Traffic Audit Bureau for Media Measurement (now called Geopath) in 1934. The organization now uses different methodologies including time of day, pedestrian data, and seasonality to arrive at impression counts for billboards.
Macleod concedes his company has been using a 20-year-old survey for its assumptions. Others use different approaches. But this partnership means Carvertise will be able to drive greater accountability to its customers.
“With static impression count per mile, we were providing a nice assumption that had scientific backing to why that number exists in real data,” Macleod says. “But none of us were differentiating between a wrapped vehicle driving down the street [before or after] a football game with hundreds of people on the streets or if it’s pouring out and nobody is on the road. Thanks to our partnership with Street Metrics, we are now picking up dynamic data in near-real time based on what is actually happening.”
Precision vs. Control
Here’s how it works: Carvertise provides StreetMetrics with its drivers’ GPS data so the new partner can overlay it with device data from nearby pedestrians and passing vehicles and share information like gender, age, and household income with its partners.
“We can share who was there and how many people were there,” Macleod says. “It’s anonymized, so we don’t know who the people are because privacy is a big, big thing. But we do understand the psychographic and demographics of the device IDs. We don’t know names, but we are getting the most accurate impression counts that we can possibly get, and we’re also getting richer data.
Partnering with StreetMetrics is a game changer from a precision standpoint, Macleod says. But he laughs when asked if there was resistance to giving up control of impression counts to a third party.
“I can’t say that there wasn’t a fair share of resistance on the sales frontier, because if you think about it, we don’t exactly know now what our impression counts are going to be until after the campaign is launched,” he says. “We’re giving up control, but it’s in the name of accuracy. Now we’re able to say we’re using an independent third party who’s the foremost expert in how to track impressions for moving wrapped vehicles, for moving advertising outputs.”
Macleod opens his laptop to pull up examples of the difference between using two-decades-old data and StreetMetrics’ near-real-time data.
Carvertise was quoting 175 impressions per mile in Chicago but recent data from StreetMetrics came back with 220 impressions per mile. Atlanta impressions increased from 195 to 412.
In New York City, the number jumped from 195 to 585 – a number that a visit early this week feels far more accurate.
But it cuts both ways. Carvertise was using 150 impressions per mile for Houston, Texas. But the recent data came back at 96 impressions per mile, which Macleod said “makes sense too because Houston’s a very spread-out market.”
“Providing our partners with deeper insights into their campaigns not only adds tremendous value but also represents a significant advancement for transit and OOH media as a whole,” says Division Sales Manager Daione Sanders. “Since integrating this feature into our presentations, we’ve received enthusiastic feedback from potential customers who appreciate this level of reporting—something rarely available in the transit and OOH space. Even though we’re not a “digital” format, advertisers still want to make informed, data-driven decisions with their marketing budgets. They favor media partners who can provide these kinds of data and insights, making this integration a strong differentiator for us.
“One feature I’m particularly excited about is our device ID passback, which means we’re providing actionable, first-party data to our brand partners—an invaluable addition to their overall strategy.”
Carvertise’s business model
Carvertise manages 150 “campaigns” with brands. Each campaign is a collection of wrapped cars on the road for one brand, with a range of cars in a given campaign. Macleod says the company has 2,500 cars on the road supporting those 150 campaigns.
Carvertise’s “fleet” includes drivers for Uber, Lyft, GrubHub, Amazon Flex and others who use their cars for work. Those drivers approach Carvertise, which screens them for such things as the condition of their car and confirms they have a driver’s license, proof of insurance, a good driving record, and can pass a background check.
“We spend a tremendous amount of time screening our drivers to make sure they’re going to be the best representatives of the brand when they’re on the road,” Macleod says. “We do ongoing consistent communication reinforcing that they’re representatives of the brand when they’re driving on the road, there’s also a consumer education that has slowly been improving that they’re not an employee of that brand.
“They are contracted drivers who wrapped their vehicle in that brand. And we have a whole team dedicated to vetting any driver complaints that occur on the road to break down what actually happened. We want to make sure that brand reputations stay high.”
Macleod says Carvertise is refining its growth goals and believes it can get to 10,000 cars wrapped and on the road by the end of 2026. Beyond that, he says the question is how to “get to our big hairy, ambitious, audacious goal? I think the 10-year plan is much bigger. But to go through the 10-year plan, you have to go through the two-year plan.”
Does Macleod want exclusivity with StreetMetrics?
Macleod says he would welcome any of Carvertise’s five largest competitors – and he concedes that his company is the leader in such categories as campaigns, number of cars on the road, tenure, and market share – deciding to embrace the StreetMetrics technology.
“We’re the first company in our space to use StreetMetrics,” he said. “Others are going off either their own math or their own assumptions or their own research paper to calculate impressions.”
Macleod urged his competitors to “call StreetMetrics and get in on the fun,” he said, explaining that Carvertise wants a consistent methodology used across the industry and believes that StreetMetrics represents the gold standard on tracking impressions.
“Our decision to do this puts pressure on them to adopt the same medium” so everyone can then compare performance instead of wild impression claims.”
