ABOUT SHADOWFENCE
Shadowfence is a geofence management platform which links physical out-of-home advertising (OOH) assets (e.g., buses, trains, taxis) to digital ads served via real-time roaming geofenced areas. Built from concept, today its disrupting one of the oldest marketing channels by addressing its biggest challenges; lack of measurable data, finding the right message and location, and achieving visual recall in densely populated neighborhoods.
Turns physical vehicles into roaming digital ad networks
Delivers real-time street-level data on conversions and attribution
Able to relocate physical media and test messaging by neighborhood
Type : Internal Utility
Date: 2021-2023
Role: Product Manager
Tech Stack: AWS, Lambda, DynamoDB
THE SOLVABLE PROBLEM
Any business will tell you, that marketing, especially through traditional channels can be the lifeblood of growth. But one popular adage, especially in OOH advertising, speaks to the challenge this analog industry faces every day and the problem we set out to solve to disrupt an otherwise analog space:
“Half the money I spend in marketing is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half - John Wanamaker”.
Asset Association
Asset details
BUILDING IT
A partner of ours looking for ways to boost the performance/value of physical vinyl advertising inventory on a fleet of tourist buses they operated asked if there was a way to leverage GPS information from those vehicles to target pedestrians in immediate proximity with digital ads. After some discovery, we designed a solution which could leverage the real-time GPS location information from unique vehicles and target mobile devices in direct proximity with digital advertising that matches the physical ads affixed on those vehicles.
The theory was these digital ads would be hyper targeted down to the street-level and have higher relevance and ad recall as they would be married with corresponding physical advertising (making them more memorable). Advertisers could easily target different neighborhoods as the vehicles move from one street to another; allowing them to test creative/messaging against different demographics. Best of all, any data collected would be first-party data.
In the first 8-weeks of concept we:
Identified an MVP scope based on the data their API made available
Built a lightweight lambda service that could pass the coordinates of a moving vehicle to a demand-side platform (DSP) as targeting parameters to serve digital ads against.
Conducted real-world tests and saw a 2X lift in traditional digital campaign performance.
Over the next 18 months, we iteratively enhanced the solution as an internal tool to be offered as a managed service by our digital advertising team. We defined 2 phases of work:
Phase 1 Market-fit: Extended the MVP with additional configuration options (controls for frequency to ping for new GPS coordinates, ability to define the radius of the geofence and support for a shadow delivering ads after a vehicle leaves an area). We also built integrations to 12 of the leading fleet management service providers (e.g., Samara, CalAmp, Omnitracs, etc) by integrating on an opportunity basis
Phase 2 Productization: After seeing a scale of up to $2 Million + in ARR we would build out a robust UI for internal teams to better enable optimization of shadowfence campaign performance and scalability of the system so it can support hundreds of thousands of contented vehicles at a time.
Phase 1 was broken down into additional workflows:
Standup a basic authentication service and configure base-line permissions for internal teams
Refactor the lambda service so it can support integration into multiple fleet management systems
Extend the API and set DynamoDB as a database to allow for additional configuration options to be set by internal teams and provide them with a way to upload those to the database (via CSV).
ACHEIVEMENTS
Phase 1 launched and expanded to +30 media partners within 18 months.
$2 Million in ARR
54% boost in campaign CTRs
3X higher engagement rate vs industry average