Out-of-home adtech business Hivestack has announced its UK launch this week with an expanded sales and operations team to tackle the world’s fourth largest outdoor ad market.
The expansion includes appointments of two new senior members to Hivestack UK, with Lee Cutter as vice president of sales and Will Brownsdon as managing director.
Brownsdon brings agency experience, having previously held roles at Publicis Groupe as OOH business director and at Posterscope as strategy director.
Meanwhile, Cutter brings commercial and business development knowledge with over 20 years’ of experience working on both the buy and sell-side of OOH, including sales leadership roles at Global Radio, Metro and CBS Outdoor.
“Hivestack’s international expansion continues today with the exciting launch of our UK business,” said Andreas Soupliotis, founder and CEO of Hivestack.
“We feel fortunate to have, not one, but two, incredibly experienced OOH UK leaders joining Hivestack. With these senior hires, we are setting the table for what we believe is an imminent comeback for programmatic DOOH advertising.”
Before Covid-19, the growth of digital out-of-home screens had helped drive weekly digital impacts to 1.1bn across the UK, according to OOH measurement body Route. At its last count in September 2019, Route recorded 45% more digital screens than the same period in 2018 – 11,734 vs 8,088.[advert position=”left”]
The industry is now in the early stages of plugging these screens together to create a programmatic infrastructure, although it faces a number of challenges in doing so.
Since lockdown, however, the OOH sector has faced a collapse in ad revenues. Research by Kinetic – based on measurement of device traffic in OOH locations – shows a 76% reduction in roadside impressions during the week commencing 6 April.
Some campaigns – including health-orientated public service messaging from the government – continue to run, but analysts believe the market value will fall by just over a half – or £163.5m – during Q2 2020, a quarter (24.5%) in Q3 2020, and 18.7% during 2020 as a whole.
Digital out-of-home – now over half of the market – is one of only two advertising vehicles that are expected to recoup losses entirely next year, however.
“In the near future, we believe that UK audiences will be outside again in full force,” said Soupliotis. “We want to be able to service UK marketers and publishers in anticipation of this recovery.”
Hivestack is headquartered in Montreal, Canada, and has further operations in Toronto, Tokyo, New York and Sydney.
