CEO John Laramie told me that the new platform builds on the services that ADstruc already offers, but the company describes the new platform as not just a new feature or tool, and instead “a complete workflow solution” offering “the easiest way to buy and sell outdoor advertising” like billboards. Agencies and other advertisers can post requests for proposal (RFPs) for their campaigns, and outdoor ad companies can bid to participate. The advertisers can actually browse the bids in a map, narrow down their search based on different criteria, and even see what their ad will look like in a given location. It’s a big change, Laramie said, from an industry where most of the campaign planning happens on spreadsheets.

Once a campaign is running, ADstruc also offers a product called ADtrack that maps geo-tagged tweets along with the ads, so advertisers can see whether the ads are driving online conversation. Normally, , once a billboard goes up, “nobody has any idea” what’s going on, Laramie said.

As for the Telmar partnership, he said Telmar is one of the leading suppliers of media advertising software, used by more than 10,000 agencies around the world to do their planning. Basically, agencies can now do their planning on Telmar’s TOPS system and their buying on ADstruc, because they can post RFPs directly from TOPS to ADstruc. That should help the startup get more traction with traditional ad agencies, and Laramie said it’s also a sign that the company wants to work with the existing industry players rather than completely disrupt them.

There are more than 1,000 companies operating on the ADstruc platform, which Laramie said equals about 80 percent of out-of-home ad inventory in the United States. Revenue is doubling quarterly, he added.

And by the way, even though a lot of the new tools are built mainly for agencies, small businesses and startups can also use ADstruc to buy billboard ads.

A billboard for Pebble designed and booked on ADstruc in just 10 days. (Photo: adstruc.com)

ADstruc is a New York-based platform for buying and selling outdoor advertising, kind of like an AdWords for the meatspace. Betabeat named the company one of its 10 Disruptive New York Startups back in early 2011, but we haven’t heard much of the company (aside from an unfounded fundraising rumor) in recent months.

However, ADstruc has been busy. The company was behind this crowdfunded billboard in the home district of SOPA sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), which was coordinated by Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian’s company Breadpig. ADstruc also hooked up the infamous Pebble, the highest-grossing Kickstarter project ever, with a big billboard on the 101 in Silicon Valley.

The company has also ventured further into interactive display advertising with projects like this billboard for Bleacher Report, which streamed news about specific sports teams based on tweets from locals.

ADstruc’s billboard booking service replaces a paper-and-Excel system used by advertisers and billboard owners. (Photo: adstruc.com)

“Things couldn’t be better – we’ve hit our stride in our industry and are working on some major agency/tech integrations,” CEO and cofounder John Laramie told Betabeat in an email. “We are now working with over 800 companies and have national coverage.”

ADstruc, headquartered in Soho, is up to 12 employees and is hiring designers.

We can help you!

Our team at DoubleSpring has built a software platform that connects; media buyers, media agencies & media sellers to create an online marketplace for outdoor advertising. We are now open to licensing the platform and managing it for you … under your own brand/website.

All revenues accrued will be retained by your company.

Possible avenues for revenue in the future:
- Commissions on bookings (10-15%)
- Listing Fee / Subscription Model
- Targeted PPC Ads on listing pages (like FaceBook Ads). This will potentially bring in a lot of OOH support companies like printers, designers, creative agency, etc.

For details: contact [at] doublespring.com

Sprouter.com

When entrepreneur John Laramie started his second business he operated from 6 p.m. – 3 a.m. Not typical business hours, but necessary ones since he still had a full-time job from 9 – 5, and used his free time to build his company. The 27-year-old founder of New York City-based ADstruc, an online marketplace for outdoor advertising, says balancing a day job with a startup was a frustrating challenge. “It is definitely not easy taking calls or meetings during the day, much less the hours from 9-6 at the full-time job, then 6-3am on ADstruc,” he says. “I was continually frustrated that I couldn’t move at the speed I wanted to.”

Laramie started his entrepreneurship journey at warp speed when he was young, though he says he always felt more like an inventor than an entrepreneur. “I was obsessed with building or taking apart anything whether it was with die-cast cars, Legos, or snow blowers,” he says. “I also asked a thousand questions as a kid like why, what if, and why not?”  He also had a few of the common kid-friendly businesses – lemonade stand, snow shoveling and grass cutting. After graduating from Maryland’s Loyola University, he worked in brand licensing and then started his own consulting agency in 2007.
His idea for ADstruc came from personal experience. He was trying to buy and sell outdoor advertising years ago and realized the process was antiquated and inefficient. “I was literally riding around Manhattan on my bike trying to find billboards for a client,” he says. “Right then, I knew I had to bring the process online.” After adding three co-founders to the company and getting some traction he was finally able to turn his attention to the company full-time. ADstruc’s NYC-based team relocated to Colorado in the summer of 2010 to participate in the TechStars program, a startup incubator that counts now-acquired SocialThing and DailyBurn as graduates. Laramie says the relationships were the biggest advantage of the program. “We were surrounded by great mentors, who to this day, add incredible value,” he says. “There really were no downsides of the program except sleeping on an air mattress for 3 months.”

Read more at Sprouter.com.

Not true, says ADstruc’s John Laramie. “We raised $1.1m on September 27th 2010, which means we would have had to burn $90,000 a month for a team that was just four people as of a month ago to be officially out of money,” he said in an email. “ADstruc isn’t even close to spending that much money on a monthly basis. We couldn’t be more pleased with how and where we have invested our money and the great results we continue to see.” However, Mr. Laramie had promised Betabeat a present. We never got said present. Also, when we asked if this meant ADstruc was not raising a round, Mr. Laramie stopped responding. The company is now up to six people and hiring for three positions.

VISITING DIGNITARIES. ZocDoc had a secret birthday party today for its four-year anniversary, to which press were not invited. The guest speaker was Tom Daschle, the former U.S. senator from South Dakota and Senate Majority Leader who co-authored a book on universal health care and is now working for global law firm DLA Piper.

WOOD CABIN FOR SALE. Angel-faced technohipster Zach Klein of CollegeHumor/Vimeo/Svpply broke up with his girlfriend, Courtney Lewis of Hard Candy Shell, and is moving to California, stomping out the last faint possibility of the “Zach Klein, upstate woodsman” story that every New York media outlet has been frothing to do. So. What happens to the cabin?

BLIND BETS. Two startups which have had extensive Betabeat coverage have raised money, Betabeat has heard. The first, a hardware startup, we heard secondhand. The second, which is not a hardware startup, was extended an offer to join 500Startups. A startup Betabeat has never written about (but we should have) will most likely be bought by Dropbox in the very near future. (Can you tell we’re bursting to spill? But we pinky-swore to be patient upon promise of greater rewards. When the time comes we will write articles, glorious articles.)

The emotional billboard is part of Adstruc’s “Billboards for Everyone” campaign. It gives artists the chance to experiment with the use of billboards. The first, which debuted last month, was created by Shepherd Fairey’s Studio Number One.

Adstruc is an auction and listing-based marketplace for outdoor advertising. The effort is sponsored by JWT New York, Fuel, SPREAD Art and Culture magazine.

Ad+Geek caught up with Tronic co-founder Vivan Rosenthal to find out how the world’s first billboard with feelings was born:

Ad+Geek: A billboard with feelings? Where did that idea come from?
Vivian Rosenthal: I launched a mobile augmented reality (AR) app called Goldrun a few months ago. It brings together GPS, virtual goods and AR to allow for location-based advertising that is visually driven. [JWT Chief Creative Innovation Officer] James Cooper and [BA Reps] Louisa St. Pierre were both familiar with [the app] work and they approached me to collaborate on a billboard. I knew I wanted to create an interactive billboard that leveraged augmented reality and from there the idea emerged to design our own take on the Emoticon and use it to bring a billboard to life. This execution is just the beginning. Tronic and GoldRun are working on a number of projects that combine out-of-home (OOH) media with mobile in really new and exciting ways.

Ad+Geek: What were the challenges in coming up this execution?
VR: Bringing together OOH and mobile will be important in the landscape of advertising, but it’s not without its challenges. The biggest hurdle is letting the OOH community know about AR and its possibilities. Right now, they are two distinct mediums that aren’t speaking to each other. Hopefully that will change.

Ad+Geek: What were some key learnings from this project?
VR: The call-to-action has to be very clear. If we did it again, we’d make the copy to download the app more prominent so that more people understood that they could participate in the experience.

Ad+Geek: How is the billboard feeling today?
VR: Very happy. It’s Friday!!!!

Related Articles:

• New York Board Knows Just How You Feel (Adfreak)
• Tronic, GoldRun and ADstruc Create Billboard with Feelings in New York (Dexigner)
• Oh Billboard, Don’t be Sad (Creativity)

Partnering with Tronic the billboard sits near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel and reads, ‘Today I’m Feeling _____’. Using a the GoldRun GPS augmented reality app, passerbys or drivers stuck in traffic can see if the billboard is happy or sad or, whether it feels like dancing or cheering on its favorite team.

Because the billboard is GPS tagged, a number of images can appear at the same site making it more interactive than typical augmented reality applications, essentially, taking a traditional billboard and making it digital. For example, users can change the feelings themselves using large-scale emoticons, and then post them to Facebook or Twitter.

This billboard is part of ADstruc’s ‘Billboards for Everyone’ campaign that partners with artists and designers to help promote creativity and innovation in the outdoor space.

ADstruc Interactive Billboard from TronicStudio on Vimeo.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a busy guy. I don’t expect him to pick up the phone every time I call. After all, he’s on a book tour or something, and busy tweeting, and drinking wine. But then I saw the picture above. Yup, that’s Gary V on his cell phone in front of a poster advertising his new book, The Thank You Economy. The poster lists a phone number, (646) 401-0368, and asks prospective readers to:

Call now and the author Gary Vaynerchuk will answer this or any other question about The Thank You Economy.*

*Unless he’s in a plane or meeting

I thought I’d prank call him and ask him some questions about the book, like, “What the hell is the Thank You Economy?” His last book, Crush It!, needed no such explanation. The title says it all, and it’s fun to say (Crush It!”). The Thank You Economy sounds too polite and vague. I have no idea what it means. I guess I should read the book. But the poster promised me that Gary would answer these questions himself. All I can say is: False Advertising!* (*Unless he was in a meeting or something).

The outdoor advertising is kind of clever, though. Vaynerchuk bought the ads through ADstruc, which let him target them on 20 pay telephone kiosks in Manhattan around Grand Central, Union Square, the East Village, and near his publisher, Harper Collins. The whole thing cost only about $20,000. There’s even one near my subway stop. It’s as though he was daring me to call.

So I did. Several times. And, like a teenage girl, I was even a little bit excited. But then he didn’t answer. It went to voicemail. From what I hear, he’s only answered about 50 calls so far. Maybe you’ll have better luck. Go ahead, give him a call at (646) 401-0368. If he answers, he can explain what the book is all about. I tried.

Update: Gary was in a meeting, he finally called me back and he’s been answering a lot of calls since this post. He was a very good sport about the whole thing. Here is his video response.

[tc_viddler vid='c778cd99' width='640' height='540']

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“There are so many cobwebs in this business that nobody wanted to clean up,” says Adstruc CEO John Laramie. Right now the marketplace for space on billboards, walls and mass transit is fragmented across numerous vendors, many of whom don’t bother with online listings.

Adstruc has created an online database for these various forms of outdoor advertising where sellers can list inventory and buyers can place bids.  “We are going to make buying billboards as easy as buying AdWords on Google.”

Laramie, 26, developed Adstruc as part of the Boulder, CO based seed fund Techstars, before moving here to found the business. In an odd twist, Techstars is now following Laramie by launching a Manhattan based version of their seed fund. “I guess NY is the place to be if you’re a young gun tech right now,” says Laramie.

The New York-based startup ADstruc — an online marketplace for outdoor advertising — closed a $1.1 million series a investment led by DFJ Gotham, with participation from RRE, Founder Collective, Jeff Clavier, David Cohen, Kal Vepuri, David Tisch and Social Leverage (Howard Lindzon) today.

The 26-year-old founder and chief executive of ADstruc, John Laramie, developed his auction and listing-based platform through TechStars in Colorado, but relocated and incorporated in New York this year.

According to ADstruc reports, media spending on outdoor advertising in 2009 reached $6 billion. The startup aims to make it easier for existing buyers to find and procure outdoor ad inventory, and to increase the number of buyers of and ad campaigns using outdoor advertising.

“We are going to make buying billboards as easy as buying AdWords on Google,” said Laramie.

The company is working with ad agencies and outdoor advertising businesses like Torrey Group, Circle Graphics and Dentsu to get started. It has not yet sold inventory, but Laramie is eyeing companies known for their outdoor creative like: movie production houses, Verizon, Disney and Coca Cola, Laramie said.

He also half-joked that “ADstruc is trying to convince TechStars to do an outdoor campaign to raise awareness about their new, New York program!”

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Editor’s note: The following report comes from Don Dodge, who blogs at Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing and is a Developer Advocate for Google. TechStars is a seed accelerator program that selects about ten companies a year and provides funding of $18,000 per team, as well as support and mentorship. Dodge covered the last Boulder TechStars class in August, 2009 when six companies (including SendGrid and Next Big Sound) went on to secure venture investment of more than $10 million in total.

TechStars has now been operating for four years. According to results data that TechStars has published, six of the first twenty companies to go through the program have been acquired by larger companies, and about 70% of its companies have been funded and/or are now profitable. This week, TechStars is debuting 11 new startups from the fourth Boulder class. The teams are presenting on Thursday to about 250 VCs and angel investors for the first time. These companies are about three months old and have two or three founder employees. Below are Don’s notes on the startups that presented.

ADstruc is an auction and listing marketplace for outdoor billboard advertising. The company says that outdoor advertising purchases are currently managed offline. They provide an online inventory management service for sellers, as well as a marketplace for transactions. Today, it’s difficult for would-be buyers to identify and purchase outdoor advertising. ADstruc aims to bring the same level of access and transparency to the outdoor advertising market as Google does with Adwords for keyword search.

StatsMix allows companies to easily build, visualize, and share custom management dashboards for displaying and analyzing key metrics from their own Websites and external APIs. StatsMix already supports and integrates with metrics from about 30 popular web services, including Google Analytics, Quantcast, MailChimp, Freshbooks, Twitter, Facebook, Get Satisfaction, WordPress, and YouTube, and is adding more regularly. They also provide a REST based API and other simple mechanisms to integrate with internal metrics. The company showed off a unique “insight engine” which automatically draws correlations between various metrics, helping users to quickly identify what may be driving trends or anomalies.

GearBox is a smart toy company that has created a robotic ball which is controlled via a smartphone. Applications can be built on the smartphone via a simple API which requires minimal coding. Early applications include “Sumo,” where two people attempt to knock each other off of a table, “Golf,” where you swipe the phone to shoot the ball at the hole, and “Kittens,” in which users can earn points by playing with their cat and causing certain interactions. Here’s a video of the ball that has already attracted 63,000+ views. The company has other smart toys already in development that will use a similar API.

Vacation Rental Partner makes it easy to manage your vacation rental home. Targeted at individuals who have vacation rental homes that they manage who don’t want to pay 30-50% of their income to management companies, Vacation Rental Partner handles the entire process including managing booking requests, contracting, billing, as well as handling outside vendors such as housekeepers and pool cleaners. The system allows homeowners to manage their vacation rental calendar in one place, but allows for automatic distribution to popular advertising outlets such as VRBO, Craiglist, and many others.

Omniar wants to make the real world clickable. They demonstrated impressive visual search technology that enables others to easily build applications using their toolkit. They are working with early adopters in the real estate, museum, and retail sectors, enabling them to allow one-click visual search and information retrieval. For example, Omniar is working with real estate companies to allow users to simply snap a photo of a home which then returns information about it. For museums, they demonstrated snapping a photo of a specific piece of art and then quickly retrieving details about it such as the artist and the story behind it. The interesting thing here is that Omniar allows anyone to enable their own applications with visual search capabilities, using their own corpus of data. Those customers can use Omniar’s technology to “scan” in the 3D models using the mobile phone as well, by simply recording a video from multiple angles. Omniar says that it is different from other visual search technologies by their unique ability to recognize fully 3D objects from any angle.

Spot Influence finds top influencers for specific topics across the entire web including Twitter, blogs, and other types of content. The company provides a search engine and has made their technology available using APIs for partners who want to integrate it more fully. Rather than using a generic “influence score” and focusing just on Twitter, Spot Influence searches the entire web and returns results based on influence for specific topics.

BlipSnips is a way to create social context around specific moments in time in a video. Long-form videos are hard to “sample” or quickly “scan” and as a result don’t attract the quick social web interactions that shorter clips do. BlipSnips allows users to easily share specific moments in a video across their social graph and increases engagement with those videos. BlipSnips has a set of free consumer tools, but also works with video publishers to drive engagement for commercial video.

Kapost creates a marketplace for web content. It enables publishers to use the same crowd-sourced virtual newsroom approach popularized by The Huffington Post and others. Kapost works with existing content management systems such as WordPress and Drupal via plugins, and enables publishers to collect and manage content from a network of community members or external contributors. Kapost provides both the tools to manage the process as well as a marketplace for publishers and contributors and tracks reputation, manages rights, and handles payment transactions between parties.

RentMonitor takes the headache out of being a landlord. Targeted at landlords who are managing 3 to 50 properties, the system handles rent collection, advertising, tenant screening, maintenance, and tax issues for landlords. If you have ever rented a property either as a landlord or as a tenant you will understand the need for automating the process. As a tenant, wouldn’t it be great to just fill out one set of documents, background checks, credit checks, and use it to apply to multiple landlords? The system is very affordable, ranging from just $5-$50 per month depending on the number of units being managed.

ScriptPad transforms the iPad and iPhone into a digital prescription pad allowing doctors to write prescriptions faster and safer than their existing paper process. ScriptPad eliminates deadly prescription writing mistakes that contribute to over 7,000 deaths each year and sends the prescription directly to the patient’s pharmacy. The company integrates with all major pharmacies through existing partnerships. ScriptPad described a “magic” business model, in which even their free users generate revenue for the company because they are paid for each prescription that is transmitted. ScriptPad also offers a premium version that qualifies doctors for government incentives.  Here’s a fun Apple-style video showing how their e-prescribing application works.

RoundPegg scientifically ensures that every hire you make is a fit for your company culture. According to RoundPegg, half of all hires fail due to poor fit with the company employees and culture. Most companies do a great job of hiring for skills, but they are flipping a coin when it comes to cultural fit.  Through simple self-service surveys, RoundPegg blends technology with psychology. It allows hiring managers to make sure candidates have a strong fit, provides interview questions to ask, answers to look for, and pros and cons that are specific to the match between the candidate and the company, the team, and the hiring manager.
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