Signeer Ltd makes outdoor advertising easy for SMEs

Signeer Ltd is an online platform designed to simplify advertising on billboards and other outdoor spaces.

Established on the belief that every small company should have easy access to affordable outdoor advertising, the website allows customers to order an outdoor poster for as short a period as a week, via an easy-to-use online platform.

Project summary

This project was a collaboration between innovative advertising agency Signeer Ltd and Kingston University. It aimed to make outdoor advertising available to everyone and design traffic estimation algorithms for advertising sites.

Reasons for collaboration

The academic collaborators had the expertise and resources to address two major issues that prevent large groups of the company's potential customers from using the platform:

• Currently, those who could otherwise benefit from outdoor advertising, such as SMEs and entrepreneurs, assume that if big brands are using it then it must be very expensive. Hence they are unaware that outdoor advertising is one of the cheapest forms of media in terms of cost per 1,000 viewers. There was a need to employ data and analytics, better to understand their possible needs for outdoor advertising and design ways and strategies to engage them.
• Most advertisers feel they have insufficient evidence to demonstrate the impact of their advertising campaigns. Signeer Ltd believed that this could be done by designing algorithms to estimate traffic near to advertising sites, using some of the available data and analytics. But they lacked the academic capacity to research and develop this.

Impact on the business

The research conducted by Kingston identified potential users of the platform, tested some of the assumptions that Signeer Ltd had, and produced interesting insights that the company will use to develop targeted strategies to overcome any barriers for those advertiser groups identified. In addition, applying the knowledge to their marketing strategy has had a positive impact as it increased the interest of existing customers. In terms of jobs created, there were two new part-time jobs created for which they use freelancers and they plan to hire one full-time employee in the next month.

Reflections on the collaboration

The collaboration was particularly productive and effective in terms of achieving the project's initial aims. Both partners had worked together before on another bid and this facilitated their communication. 

The biggest challenge of the collaboration was to keep to the timescales, given both partners' busy calendars. Both partners took steps to overcome this, for example through communicating outside normal office hours.

Funding has been key to enabling long-term impact as well as sustaining the ethos nurtured within the collaboration. Another challenge was thus the current lack of future funding to support further development and expansion.

Future directions

Both partners would like to continue the collaboration and will be looking for funding opportunities to follow up the research towards areas that build on the work done within this project.

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