CAASie is a digital marketing platform that lets you advertise on what we call “outdoor” or “out of home” inventory. You’ll be familiar with some of these formats, even if you haven’t necessarily recognised them out and about in your day. So, when we say out-of-home, we mean things like the digital billboards on the sides of the highway, the digital bus shelters in your city, or even the free-standing screens that you might walk past when you’re in a shopping centre.
Generally speaking, all of these “boards” are owned by different people. We call them media owners. But when you’re running a campaign, you’re not interested in buying from just one media owner - you probably want a specific region that has multiple media owners. Rather than organising multiple campaigns, one-by-one across each media owner, CAASie allows you to set up the one campaign, targeting the exact boards you want, regardless of who owns them. Like a marketplace, you know.
How does it work?
When you set up a campaign, you’ll choose a number of things including:
- When the campaign is scheduled to run (dates, times, and so forth);
- Which boards or screens you want your ads to display on, and;
- How much you’re willing to spend.
We’ll cover those points in more detail further below and in the Campaign Setup tutorials, but here are a few concepts to wrap your head around.
CAASie works by taking your campaign parameters and serving as many ads (to the boards you’ve chosen, obviously) as she can within your settings.
The boards you choose are digitally-connected, meaning they dynamically populate their ad schedule throughout the day. So, when an opportunity arises to play an ad, the screen will request CAASie for an ad copy. If your campaign is targeting that board, and you have budget to spare, CAASie will deliver your ad and charge you what she’s owed for that specific play (once it has played).
Where can I advertise?
There’s well over 100,000 different boards on the CAASie platform, all over the world, in a wide range of different cities, and placements. Generally speaking though, these screens are in public venues with sufficiently high foot traffic to…well, consider putting up a board in the first place.
This ranges from billboards on the side of a highway, to “street furniture” on boardwalks in the middle of a city, to TVs in doctors’ waiting rooms or even screens housed in a petrol station (or gas station, for my friends up north).
On CAASie, you can hand-pick the boards you want to advertise on. If you want to pick just the one board in the one shopping centre (or mall), you can absolutely do that.
How do I start?
Obviously, you need to make an account on CAASie first.
From there, the platform will walk you through creating your first campaign. Skip to a step-by-step guide on creating a campaign here.
You’ll also have to top up your account with CAASie credits, which we’ll cover in more detail in the Account Setup - Billing article, which you can find here.
What does it cost?
For this explanation to make the most sense, please read the article on how CAASie works.
CAASie sells ad space on a per-play basis. Each ‘play’ may last between 6 and 60 seconds, and varies from board to board. The cost for these plays is dependent on a couple of factors:
- How long the play lasts (e.g. 10s)
- The number of people reached during the play (e.g. over the 10s)
- How ‘impactful’ the site is.
It’s worth noting that ‘impact’ is a subjective measure determined by the media owner in question. In general, this just serves to value a giant billboard in the middle of a city higher than a bus shelter in suburban areas.
Play costs generally range from $0.05 for small sites (e.g. fuel stations, gyms, or bus shelters), up to $5.00 or more (e.g. highway billboards to/from the airport).
Check out the cost calculator to see how much a campaign will cost you to run.
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