Moving Walls acquires Ahoy’s ad-tech platform to strengthen location-based advertising stack

Singapore-headquartered ad-tech firm Moving Walls Group has announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Ahoy, an ad-tech company that has built a proprietary location-based advertising platform. 

Coming during a period when global lockdowns have decimated OOH media spends, Ahoy’s mobile advertising capabilities will become part of both Moving Walls’ OOH planning platform and Location Media Xchange (LMX), the newly formed company that provides supply-side technology to OOH media owners. 

Even as APAC has become OOH’s largest market with a reported revenue of US$13 billion in 2018, it represents just a fraction of total media spending. By comparison, mobile advertising in APAC alone was forecasted to breach the US$100 billion mark in 2020.

Ahoy has built a complete programmatic advertising tech stack with a focus on leveraging location signals and purchase data to improve digital campaigns. With this acquisition, their Demand Side Platform (DSP), Data Management Platform (DMP) for hyperlocal targeting, and Control Panel for optimising campaigns in real-time will be integrated into LMX’s, connecting OOH media owners to the US$100 billion mobile advertising spend in APAC. The company has worked with a host of global brands including Coca Cola, Unilever, Pepsico, and GlaxoSmithKline among others.

Srikanth Ramachandran, Founder and Group CEO of Moving Walls believes the timing of integrating Ahoy’s mobile and location-first programmatic technology into Moving Walls’ and LMX’s platforms is ideal.

According to him, “Every OOH media owner can now become a hyperlocal advertising provider by seamlessly providing a layer of mobile advertising to billboard campaigns. This reduces their dependence on the perception of traffic around their sites. Besides technology, we are excited to have the hugely experienced Ahoy team aboard.”

“Meanwhile,” he continues, “For the advertisers, it is now possible to plan campaigns for OOH and mobile to reach ‘moving audiences’ on all screens from a single platform. It is also now possible to extract more qualitative insights from OOH campaigns by running incentivised brand studies on the exposed audiences.”

Puneet Giri, CEO of Ahoy, has spent close to two decades in the mobile world working with leading global telecommunications equipment providers. He is excited about the potential of integrating Ahoy’s tech stack to Moving Walls’ and LMX’s existing OOH platforms and activating a complete location-based marketing platform across four continents. 

“Essentially, the location signals that power outdoor advertising measurement can be used to reach similar audience segments online and influence audiences who have already been primed. This is a powerful combination as brands will not be looking to drive footfall to physical stores when people movement starts to pick up. We now have the ability to take our home-grown solution to more than seven markets where Moving Walls already has a presence, ” he said.