After launching in June 2016, Blip has made waves in the digital advertising space.
Nearly two years ago, I sat down with Blip co-founder Brent Thomson and enjoyed a nice lunch of Korean BBQ in Provo, UT. He explained to me his new venture — billboard advertising, blip by blip — and I agreed to write a feature around the creation of Blip. At the time, Blip was in the process of hashing out a partnership with YESCO Outdoor Media that centered on Blip selling digital billboard advertising in small segments (or blips), opening the door for small businesses to purchase advertising space while staying within budget.
In June 2016, Thomson and fellow co-founder James Munnerlyn officially launched Blip and I have breaking news: things are going quite well.
Since the partnership was formed Blip has increased YESCO’s top-line digital revenue by 11%, adding 9x the amount of digital advertisers to YESCO’s business. I’m no business guru, but these are good numbers. So good, in fact, that YESCO has led an undisclosed funding round in Blip to further strengthen the bounds of their union.
“By pioneering this with us and backing us, YESCO is pointing to us as the solution for industry-wide adoption,” said Munnerlyn. “YESCO shares the vision that we have and after experiencing the success of it, they really wanted to get behind us.”
So how did Blip make such an impact on YESCO and digital advertising? By opening the industry up to everyone. For obvious financial reasons, small businesses have been hesitant to advertise via billboards, the cost being greater than most SMB budgets. From YESCO’s side of things, this resulted in lot of digital advertising space going unsold. Everyone suffered.
Blip has solved both those problems. By selling ad space in blips (buyers can purchase digital ad space for as brief as eight seconds), Blip changed the game for small businesses, removing financial restrictions and enabling them to design an affordable gameplan for digital advertising. And instead of sitting on large amounts of unused digital billboard space, YESCO now has the solution to fill space that has previously gone unsold. Everyone wins.
“We wanted to prove that we could fundamentally change the economics of the game for a sign owner, while at the same time opening up the medium to the 98% of businesses that were not using them,” said Munnerlyn.
