OneScreen

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Founders: Andrei Opesan, Greg Wise & Sam Mallikarjunan
Founding: 2020
Mission: OneScreen.ai’s mission is to transform marketing by modernizing the market for out of home advertising.  Because we believe that advertising, like life, is better in the real world.
Employees: 30 & 30% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $4.7M raised
Investors: Asymmetric Capital Partners, Hanover Technology Management, Impellent Ventures, Techstars & notable Angels
Key Customers: Ramp, DraftKings, bobbie, Cozy Earth, Leafly
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $20M+ (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

OneScreen is building an end to end analytics platform to help brands select, purchase, and measure OOH (out of home) advertising. They’re bringing better analytics to the oldest advertising platform in the world: real life. Because life is better in the real world!

The company was founded in 2020 by a group of former HubSpot leaders – Andrei Opesan, Greg Wise & Sam Mallikarjunan. Do all roads in Boston tech lead back to HubSpot?? Over some drinks the group debated the challenges they were having maintaining ROI on digital advertising channels. As they discussed their predicament, they wondered how the TV on the restaurant wall measured its audience. They began exploring connected TV and set out to build a platform that would report accurate CPMs & attribution for screens at store checkout lines, taxis & ride shares, and elevators.

It’s not easy to get impression counts for these devices so they wanted to invent something that could bring measurement to the medium. As they navigated the idea maze, they soon realized that there is an even bigger problem in the “offline” media category. Did you know billboards have been around since 1835? But after almost 200 years, measuring their effectiveness still isn’t great…

Performance marketers tend to shy away from legacy offline channels because they can’t measure the campaigns. So OOH advertising campaign measurement is the problem that OneScreen set out to solve.

OOH advertising is a $39B market due to grow to $55B by 2028 and it’s highly fragmented (src). There are four large billboard players – Lamar (25%), Outfront Media (20%), Clear Channel (16%), & JCDecaux (2%) – followed by a long tail of mom & pop independents representing ~35% of the market (src). Not to mention all the changes that digital advertising channels have undergone. The demise of the browser cookie, Apple’s increased privacy policies & the depreciation of the IDFA, and Google’s plans to follow suit in 2024. Advertisers are having a harder time tracking the ROI of their digital advertising spend.

OneScreen began building analytics to bring disparate data sources together to show marketers all the out of home inventory that indexes highest for their target audience. Depending on an advertiser’s reach & frequency goals, their SaaS platform can help marketers build a specific inventory & media plan to buy OOH advertising at scale, maximizing ROI via different formats & inventory across the U.S.

They’re helping to provide the analytics to supply the missing piece of a truly measurable omni channel approach for marketers. Imagine a company who is trying to enter a physical market for the first time and deploy budgets across TV, Radio, Podcasts & Digital. They have multi touch attribution models for all those performance channels but OOH doesn’t feature in any of those. OneScreen is integrating offline data so that advertisers can see conversion lift across their broader marketing stack.

Alex Ewing came into the business in 2023 through investor Asymmetric Capital as their growth stage CEO to add operational rigor and help OneScreen get to the next level on their path up the mountain to build a billion dollar business. Alex brings a focus on process and responsible growth to increase revenue at an appropriately aggressive pace without having to take on too much dilutive capital in the process. The OneScreen team is lucky to be in a spot where they have a balance sheet to support their 2024 growth plans. And the real world is just an awesome advertising experience for marketers & consumers. Billboards are canvases! 

OneScreen works exclusively on the demand side of the advertising market – with marketers – and does not own or re-broker any inventory. They will work to integrate more partners like mobile measurement partners & other platforms that help provide real time visibility on inventory & pricing to better streamline the OOH purchasing experience from an analytics perspective, using a data driven approach.

From a technical perspective, a big part of their secret sauce is the comprehensive database of every OOH opportunity in the U.S. they’ve built which is constantly being enriched by performance data from live campaigns. That billboard in the Bay Area off the 101 near the Palo Alto exit? How about the one on the Mass Pike by Fenway Park? I’d be curious to know how it *actually* performs too!

OneScreen builds quality scores for billboards and other OOH inventory formats. They note attributes like how far off the road is the placement, is it hard to see at night, is it blocked by trees, etc. Overlaying that contextual data with people movement & demographic data enriches the database as it grows. Probabilistic methodologies help them tie together web traffic & foot traffic by physical locations to estimate who saw an ad and then took a digital action. They leverage exposed audiences vs. lookalike audiences to show conversion lift from consumers who have seen an advertisement vs. a baseline “control” cohort. OneScreen even has a home measurement methodology that’s been peer reviewed by Northeastern.

In 2023, under Alex’s leadership, the team has found its identity and a new gear. They reduced their operating expenses by 50% and tripled revenue, finding a repeatable go to market motion that has allowed them to scale in 2024. They’re laser focused on scaling the business by adding talent and growing revenue to add value for customers. In 2024 they will be adding talent across Marketing, Product & Engineering to make their OOH platform even more compelling for advertisers. 

The team plans to run at a breakeven pace to control their own destiny, admiring companies like Klaviyo and the Trade Desk who raised minimal amounts of venture capital until much later in their company lifecycle, building revenue engines that deliver real value for customers to finance their growth.

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the OneScreen team if I missed any up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

  • Head of Marketing
  • Head of Product

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the key platform differentiators relative to other OOH measurement tools?
  • How does OOH fit into most marketing media plans today? 
  • What is the long term vision for the company? 
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about OneScreen you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team help more advertisers measure their offline spend digitally. All marketers & curious consumers applaud your efforts. See you on billboards around town!

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