Interview with Nicola Palmas, CEO of Billalo
November 2, 2021
Interview with Nicola Palmas, CEO of Billalo, a digital solutions suite aimed at outdoor advertising.
Marketing is at the core of every company, it’s the ultimate force that drives profits. It is, without a doubt, a necessary investment. Now, technology has transformed the marketing world, but this doesn’t mean that “Out Of Home” advertising has been taken out of the equation: nowadays, the best strategy relies on the fusion between traditional and digital marketing.
What is OOH?
Out Of Home advertising is a form of offline marketing that provides businesses with visibility and exposure through the use of billboards, billboard trucks, scaffolding ads, ads placed at exhibitions, airports, stations and sports fields.
What is Billalo?
Offline advertising usually suffers from poor response measurability. Billalo, on the other hand, allows businesses to easily purchase ad space through a well-structured, efficient online platform that is able to collect data and feedback. On the platform, you can find the best outdoor ad spaces in Italy with the help of advertising intelligence tools, and consequently start your marketing campaign. It will only take you a few clicks, and the payment methods are secure.
Step 1
Sign in and search for the best ad spaces based on the visibility factor: poster ads, transit ads, billboards, sports field ads and indoor ads.
Step 2
Billalo will use its collected data to determine the best ad space in line with your target audience and budget.
Step 3
Pay in one go, and Billalo will deliver your payment to your chosen advertising dealership.
Step 4
Decide whether or not to outsource to Billalo the printing and the delivery of the material.
Step 5
Lastly, download advanced analytics.
Want to find out more about Billalo? Just read the interview below with Billalo CEO Nicola Palmas!
Hi Nicola, nice to meet you, and thank you for your time. Billalo: what is it about, exactly?
Hello, and thank you for inviting me. Billalo is an advertising intelligence solution for traditional, Out Of Home marketing. It shares some aspects with online advertising – such as purchase experience, quick planning, and the precision in measuring results and predictions – but in offline form. Initially, we saw the project as an “Airbnb for outdoor ad spaces”, but the advertising intelligence tools made it progressively evolve into much more than that. OOH is incredibly powerful in that it doesn’t allow onlookers to “skip” forward, or to block the ads completely with a premium plan. It’s also a very old form of marketing, and – to me personally – it can tell a lot about a local economy: coming to a city filled with ad spaces gives off a more lively, trustworthy vibe. Surprisingly enough, its potential is still vastly underappreciated. Nielsen demonstrated how the Online Activation Index regarding OOH is greater than TV, the radio and printed paper. However, many countries, Italy included, find it very hard and costly to collect feedback about the purchase experience through this advertising method. This considerably slows down investments. Billalo is therefore trying to unleash OOH advertising’s full potential by providing its online platform with the typical framework used on programmatic advertising sites: it’s a Data Management Platform where we geolocate ad spaces and grade them based on format, elevation, lighting, if they’re facing toward the road, and on the average levels of traffic in their proximity. Ad spaces, pricing policies and occupation calendars are managed by the Supply Side Platform’s media owners, so that we’re constantly updated about every space’s availability. Companies can search for ad spaces on the Demand Side Platform, where they can determine their features and availability in real time. Once they start their marketing campaign, businesses can use the Print&Deliver service of the material, and track the campaign’s progress. Therefore, the whole process takes place in the real world. Moreover, this is all achieved with no third-party involvement.
How and when did the idea of Billalo come to you?
It was some time ago. Around 2013 I was a marketer and advertiser for various music festivals in Sardinia. Social media digital advertising tools were getting increasingly competitive and precise, especially in Facebook’s case. I was shocked by the results those small advertising investments brought, and what made them so substantial was the ability to monitor them, something that was nearly impossible to do with offline ads. In 2016, while living in London, I booked a holiday house in Sardinia with Airbnb, and that’s when it hit me: why not use these same booking engines for rooms and houses for ad spaces too? Thus, me and a few friends built a prototype that put our idea into reality. Once I came back to Italy in 2017, we wrote our first business plan and received a €10.000 non-refundable aid to launch our idea on the market and build an MVP.
How long did it take for the project to take form?
A pretty long time. We didn’t look for private funding, and this slowed us down considerably. In 2019, we spent 8 months trying to build up the startup telematically, but we encountered a plethora of shortcomings in administration and bureaucracy. In February of 2020 we finally established our company. When the pandemic hit, we waited until June to present our business plan for a call financed by European funds. We then obtained a new, more consistent non-refundable aid. What really mattered to us was keeping an eye on customer discovery by always being updated on market changes, international competition and the clients’ true needs. We have two main goals: establishing a new form of OOH ad campaign planning in Italy in the short run; re-evaluating the relevance and effectiveness of OOH advertising at an international level in the long run. Our digital solution will make the advertisers’ job easier. The heavy stuff will be taken care of for them, so that they’ll dedicate all their time to strategy and creativity, two important aspects of advertising. It wasn’t easy, but here comes the fun part: we’ll have to work a lot!
Who’s Billalo’s target audience? And how’s the market responding so far?
Billalo is for those who are involved with OOH marketing. There are advertising dealerships (media owners) that manage ad space inventories, and temporarily sell ad spaces through the Supply Side Platform. On the other side there are businesses, advertising agencies and media centres that plan OOH advertising campaigns. These entities can easily find the best ad spaces through the Demand Side Platform. Once they’ve found their spaces, they can include them in their ad campaigns by online purchasing. When we started testing our formula on the market last April, we especially had success with advertising dealerships, which often can’t find the right management software, or want to reach as many clients as possible in the post-pandemic era. Demand-wise, we encountered great response from those we directly got involved with, but OOH marketing skeptics are still plenty. But this is our mission: awakening interest in our model and convincing potential customers of the power of OOH advertising, especially when it’s mixed in with digital channels.
The digital revolution inevitably changed advertising methods. How can offline marketing still be relevant in this climate?
We cannot give up on a multi-channel approach, since it helps communicate the brands’ message and values in a coherent manner. The digital transformation, oddly enough, made us more defensive in regards to online advertising. Indeed, studies show that we’re paying more attention to the outside world now. The OAAA – Out Of Home Advertising Association of America – states that 85% of consumers deems OOH useful, while the 83% deems it a trustworthy means of information. The web is full of disinformation and fake news, which can even reach authoritative news sources. On the Internet this is enhanced to the maximum, with scam advertisements popping up left and right. This can only increase skepticism. But if that same online ad is seen on a billboard anywhere in the city, the message automatically gains more credibility. It all comes down to the consumers’ trust in the brands: the OAAA states that 58% of consumers search for a product online, and 35% of those people will buy the product only after seeing it as an OOH ad. In the meantime, we’re regaining local relevance with the benefits of a global comparison. We treasure the “Think global, act local” motto, and we’re trying to implement it into our tools. Knowledge of the territory and of the audience, results analysis and ease of online purchase are Billalo’s key aspects.
How did you launch your project?
Actually, it’s not out yet. We plan on launching it at the start of 2022 with our first advertising campaign in Italy. We spent a lot of time on studying, developing and testing the project’s features, while gathering feedback from the sector’s operators. The launch is very important, but we’re aware that our startup is still young and to be improved. We know we won’t launch a perfect product right away, but we’ll put in the effort to constantly refine it and renovate it. In any case, for the launch we studied a strategy that the advertising dealerships registered on Billalo found super exciting.
Fun fact: do you use Billalo yourselves in order to plan your ad campaigns?
For sure, that’s what I was hinting at! We’re raising money to invest in our own OOH marketing campaign on the same ad spaces our ad dealerships are selling on the Supply Side Platform. Apart from Billalo, we advertise in the same spaces we use for our ads. It’s our celebration of “Think global, act local”, of the integration between digital and the real world, and of advertising as the core of business. There’s no better way to advertise ourselves than our own OOH ads. But even so, incorporating digital channels is of vital importance.
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